Wallpaper FAIL!
Of all the articles I have written and research I have done, no topic seems to be as popular as wallpaper. Believe it or not, it seems that more people are drawn to dressing up their desktop than making their computer run faster. I sure can’t blame anyone for pursuing a pleasant scene to stare at for hours a day, I was just surprised when I saw the numbers. Luckily for you desktop connoisseurs, I recently stumbled onto an article over at digital inspiration (via lifehacker.com) that outlines the benefits of using bing (the search engine) for wallpaper hunting. You don’t want to miss the details.
The original article on digitalinspiration.com, written by Amit Agarwal, outlines how you can use the bing image search to find wallpaper that fits your screen. While this may not seem like a difficult task to most, picking the proper image size for a desktop background can be more difficult than you think. In order to really explain the benefits of the “bing wallpaper search” I want to take a step back and demonstrate the “old” method for hunting down wallpaper and compare the two.
Screen Resolution
The screen resolution of your computer is defined by the number of pixels shown horizontally and vertically. If you right-click on your desktop and choose properties (screen resolution for Vista and 7 users), you can access the “display properties” and see what your computer is currently set at.
In short, you want to pick a wallpaper that matches, or comes very close to, your screen resolution. By doing this, the image will be crisp and undistorted. Faces won’t look stretched or too narrow and shapes like circles and squares will be shown properly. It may seem like a small detail, but you are going to be staring at the screen for the majority of the day, right?
As an example, I have taken a screen shot from my laptop (shown to the right). Based on the screen resolution (1280 x 800), I should be looking for images that were created/saved at the same size.
Finding Images – Old Method
Until recently, you were confined to searching through individual web sites for images that matched your resolution. Great sites like vladstudio.com made it easy to choose an image, if you already knew your resolution, but only gave you a small sampling of what the internet had to offer. Here is an example of the choices in screen resolution from vladstudio.com. When you include the standard screen resolutions, cell phone screen sizes, dual monitor and triple monitor setups there are over 50 choices for that one desktop image.
VladStudio Has Options - Do you know which one to pick?
Google came along and added size “filtering” to their image searches, giving you a way to narrow down images to a size you could use. This handy tool is available (over on the left-hand side under “any size”) for every image search you do on Google, but you still have to know your resolution when searching.
Google Filtering
Now – bing Wallpaper search
Finally, we have moved on to a reason that I might actually start using bing for some searches. Their new Wallpaper size filter allows you to search for anything and simply filter for wallpapers that match your screen resolution. You don’t have to know what that screen resolution is in advance. That piece of information is transmitted every time you visit a web site (along with your operating system, IP address and some other tidbits).
bing Wallpaper filter
To access this great new tool, simply search for an image and then look for the “Size” filter over on the left-hand side of the screen. One problem (if you can call it that) that I have noticed is bing doesn’t register dual-monitor setups. It’s a small price to pay for this fantastic functionality.
Tags: bing, desktop, filter, Google, image, Resolution, screen, VladStudio, wallpaper
