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If you can’t live without a nice wallpaper on your desktop you might need to invest many hours in the search for the perfect one – that fits to your resolution and has an appealing theme. The quality of the desktop images is often not the one you’d praise over and over again looking at your desktop. The best wallpapers aren’t cheap photos, but are works of art in their own right.

In the third part of our collection you’ll find many different types of background images – beautiful wallpapers, devkits, Flickr pools, Widescreen and HD-monsters and even wallpapers-related social communites and wallpapers for gamers.

You might want to take a look at the previous collections of wallpapers we’ve already put together:

• Selected Wallpapers: For Desktop & Web-Design
  60+ selected posters, wallpapers, galleries and background images.
• More Creative and Beautiful Wallpapers
  42 more galleries of wallpapers and posters.
• Christmas Wallpapers

[By the way, did you know there is a brand new Smashing Wordpress Book? Push WordPress past its limits!]

Selected Wallpapers — Volume 3

c’t Wallpapers
Hundreds of computer-related wallpapers and full screen illustrations in 240×320 to 1600×1200. Penguins rock.

Wallpapers.ru
Amazing collection of high-quality wallpapers – sorted by categories, “box-packs” and authors – in high resolution. In Russian.

13 Fantastic Free Wallpaper Images
By Crestock. In 4 formats as Widescreen (16:10) or Fullscreen (4:3) — from 1024×768 to 2560×1600.

Wallpapers Flickr Pool
Over 20,000 various wallpapers — minimum 1024×768 resolution.

Wallpaperstock.net
Hundreds of categorized wallpapers — RSS-feed is also available.

VladStudio Wallpapers
Artistic wallpapers designed by a young Russian designer and graphic artist.

Design Is… Pool
This Flickr pool “is only for geeky designer wallpapers made by designers for designers about design. Nothing else.” 240 images – designers’ statements – in different resolutions.

ArtLebedev Wallpapers and Posters
Dozens of wallpapers with an extensive use of whitespace. Some creative designs are also available.

Deep Blue Wallpaper Devkits
A .psd-devkit you can use for your own wallpaper designs (35 Mb). With this template you can develop wallpapers for both 30″ screen resolutions as well as dual screen setups – for those of you using two displays or a giant 30” Apple Cinema Display.

Another wallpaper devkit by Wolfgang Bartelme – Wallpaper Devkit 3.

Desktopography
The third Desktopography exhibition includes 40 amazing themes created by well-known graphic designers, illustrators and artists. The web-site itself isn’t that amazing – it is based on Flash and provides its visitors with background music. The latter actually fits to the themes of the wallpaper designs.

Mike Bonnell’s Wallpaper
The designer offers over 100 surreal and abstract images.

Gallery of Art
A growing gallery of wallpapers with “dark” themes — in various resolutions. The images are opening in pop-ups, so check whether your ad-blocker block them.

Vista Wallpaper
These wallpapers aren’t necessarily related to Microsoft’s operating system. However, the site offers beautiful themes – among them also nature-related wallpapers.

Looking for original Windows Vista Wallpapers? Here you go.

Mexivista
Offers every month a new theme with a calendar. Impressive, however the resolution is sometimes too small.

Four
Unusual drawings as wallpapers in the 1600×1200 resolution.

Adobe CS3 Wallpaper
5 themes by Terry White.

Animepaper
Hundreds of wallpapers with themes from Japanese anime. In various resolutions. Registration is required.

Game-Related Wallpapers

Gamers Wallpapers Gallery
8620 games-related wallpapers, particularly huge wallpapers of cars. Most pictures are presented in high resolution, e.g. 1900×1200.

BestGameWallpapers
Hundreds of game-related wallpapers in the 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1280×960 and 1024×768 resolution.

WoW – World of Warcraft Motive
So many elves, trolls and Warcraft creatures on one site — the choice is big, and so is the time you’ll need to find the perfect World of Warcraft-wallpaper for your desktop.

Widescreen (16:9) and HD Wallpapers

DMB – Dualmonitor Backgrounds
The specialist for huge wallpapers. Panorama views in 17 categories; among them Science-Fiction (Screenshot), Music, Microscopic, Industrial, Astronomy, Abstract, Animals, Mobile Technology, Nature, Computers.

The Widescreen Wallpapers Pool
A Flickr-pool with almost 450 widescreen wallpapers.

Screentreats: HD Wallpapers Blog
This weblog presents high-resolution widescreen wallpapers regularly. Resolutions: 3200×1200, 2650×1600, 1920×1080, 1280×720, 1920×1200 and more.

Social Wallpapering

Social Wallpapering
Wallpaper in Web 2.0. Users can upload, rate and share their images within the community. All images are uploaded anonymously. What about copyright?

Desktop Nexus
The project has the same concept. User produce content and share it with each other. The site has over 7000 wallpapers from various sources.