Where To Get The Best 4K Wallpapers

The wallpaper is often the centerpiece of your phone or desktop, so having the perfect image can have a big impact on your online experience. It’s the first thing you see when you turn your device on, and you see it every time that you exit out of apps or minimize them. Having the right background can make your device feel like it’s truly your own, whether that’s a Windows 11 PC, a Mac, or a phone.

Finding the right wallpaper can sometimes be a challenge, so we’re here to help with that. We’ve rounded up some great resources for grabbing yourself some 4K wallpaper (and even higher resolution options). These resources include tons of beautiful backgrounds for PCs and phones alike – we hope it helps you find something that you love!

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Best wallpaper website: Wallhaven

Vast 4K repository for all tastes

Wallhaven is an excellent resource for grabbing new wallpapers for your laptop, especially if you want them to be in a specific resolution. In some ways, the site seems fairly basic, as there aren’t specific categories to navigate to. However, you’ll see a search bar front and center so that you can quickly search for what you want, or you can browse the homepage or “Toplist” for the most popular wallpapers to see what’s trending. One of the great things about this site is that when you search, you can easily filter results by resolution, so it’s much easier to find wallpapers that look crisp on whatever screen you have.

You can find all kinds of images on Wallhaven, from nature, to artistic, as well as designs themed around nerd culture and video games. If you want a new wallpaper for your laptop or desktop, this is definitely one of the best places to find it.

• Check out Wallhaven

Best for live wallpapers: Wallpaper Engine

Most fun you can have with PC wallpapers

Wallpaper Engine is a paid app on Steam, but it more than justifies the $4 you’ll spend on it. It gives you access to thousands of animated wallpapers created by a superb community of artists. You can browse both 2D and 3D animated wallpapers spanning various categories such as Anime, Abstract, CGI, Fantasy, Game, Nature, Pixel art, Technology, and more. You simply need to use the search bar and the generous filters to find tons of wallpapers for your desktop. I’ve been hooked on some of the best Wallpaper Engine wallpapers since I tried them out.

You can also create multiple playlists to suit various moods, and even create and submit your own wallpapers. 4K wallpapers, 8K wallpapers, wide-screen wallpapers — there are enough wallpapers for any type of user to stay amused for months. Note that Wallpaper Engine will consume a chunk of system resources while on your computer, but thankfully, it pauses the wallpaper when you’re playing a game to enhance performance.

• Check out Wallpaper Engine

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Best wallpaper app for mobile: Backdrops

Polished, fun-to-use wallpaper app for phones

If you think wallpaper websites are a relic of the past, then there are apps you could use to select your wallpapers as well, and a cool one is Backdrops. It’s been the go-to app for smartphone wallpapers for many people, and it has clearly earned its reputation. It has a repository of thousands of mobile wallpapers with lots of contributors adding their own every day, and there’s even a curated list with wallpapers from specific artists favored by the Backdrops team. It’s one of the best places to grab mobile wallpapers right now.

• Backdrops for iPhone
• Backdrops for Android

Best for artistic wallpapers: DeviantArt

Check out some of the best artists do their thing

DeviantArt is a site that has existed for a long time, created over 20 years ago. From the beginning, it has had one purpose: to serve as a resource for users to upload their art and show it to the world. Their online art can be anything; and yes, some people have chosen to make and share wallpapers on the platform. Getting your wallpapers from DeviantArt allows you to get them straight from the source (the artist), plus you can get some pretty unique stuff you probably won’t be able to find elsewhere.

It’s an excellent resource for getting the best 4K wallpapers if you’re the artistic type or if you simply want to set something more unique as your device background.

• Check out DeviantArt

Best for premium phone wallpapers: Abstruct

Exclusive wallpapers hard to find elsewhere

Hampus Olsson is an artistic genius, but you might know him better as the guy who makes the wallpapers for OnePlus devices and the Paranoid Android custom ROM. But he also has an app called Abstruct where he shares those wallpapers as well as other exclusive wallpapers for the users of the app. The catalog is much smaller than the other options on this list, as you might expect, but by paying for your wallpapers you’ll be supporting the artist directly.

It’s an excellent app to consider if you want a place to get wallpapers you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

• Abstruct for iPhone
• Abstruct for Android

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Best for minimalists: Simple Desktops

Keep it simple yet classy

We’re going back to wallpaper websites for a second, but for a good reason. Simple Desktops is a website where you can grab simple wallpapers, as the name suggests. Simple, in this context, means minimalistic — wallpapers with very little going on. If you’re going for a clean, custom aesthetic on whatever device you’re using, with minimalist wallpaper as the centerpiece of your setup, Simple Desktops is a good place to get them.

Much like the wallpapers themselves, the website is very minimalistic, so it’s pretty simple to navigate and there isn’t much to it.

• Check out Simple Desktops

Best for photography: Unsplash

Unsplash still has some of the best wallpapers

If you’re looking for beautiful wallpapers that are also real locations, or if you enjoy daydreaming about places to visit, Unsplash is the website for you. Unsplash isn’t just a wallpaper website, it focuses on photography in general, but that also means you get some stunning images of amazing landscapes, cities, and more. The images on Unsplash are all very high quality, and while some of them require a subscription, most of them are free and they look genuinely fantastic.

You also have the option to filter for portrait and landscape orientations, so you can find images for your computer or phone. The search feature isn’t the most advanced, but as far as the wallpapers are concerned, it’s hard to get much better than Unsplash. You can check it out below.

• Check out Unsplash

Honorable Mention: Google Wallpapers

Pixel users would know

Of course, we can’t close this out without mentioning Google’s own Wallpapers app. It’s the default wallpaper manager on Pixel phones, but it also doubles as a place where you can get awesome wallpapers for your device. It doesn’t allow you to download them, which is a big bummer, but it more than makes up for it by having amazing wallpapers in every category, even if the selection is a little bit more limited than that on other sites or apps. There’s also a handful of animated wallpapers as well.

It also doubles as a wallpaper manager for your smartphone. That means the app will allow you to set your own home screen and lock screen wallpapers, and even pick them from your image gallery.

• Wallpapers for Android

Also great: Bing Wallpaper

Bing might be better than Google in this case

Google isn’t the only big company offering cool wallpapers for you to use on your devices. Microsoft has a dedicated Bing Wallpaper app you can use on your PC. One of the cool things about Bing is that shows some beautiful photography on its homepage with a new picture every day, and the Bing Wallpaper app will bring daily images straight to your desktop, alternating them to keep things fresh and unique. It’s a great way to see gorgeous sights from around the world, and you can even learn where each picture was taken, which might give you ideas of places to visit at some point.

On mobile, there isn’t an official standalone Bing Wallpaper app, but you can install some third-party apps to achieve the same purpose. Or you could use the Microsoft Launcher on Android, which has Bing wallpapers built in for easy customization.

If you don’t want a dedicated app, Windows 11 also has a Windows Spotlight feature built in, which brings new photos to your desktop every day. Some of these may also come from Bing, but they’re not the same as Bing’s daily image, and they may actually be different for everyone on any given day.

• Download Bing Wallpaper

Depending on your use case, what style you’re looking for, and what device you’re using, different options might work better than others for getting the best 4K wallpapers. For desktop computers, the typical method is to get onto a website and download a new wallpaper as an image file to your computer, then set it manually as your desktop wallpaper. As you can see in the list above, there are a few great options you can use for that.

Wallhaven is a great site as it allows you to search for wallpapers on all kinds of different resolutions and categories, but a lot of the wallpapers hosted on this platform are ones making the rounds around the internet anyway. If you want something a little bit more unique or specific, either DeviantArt or Simple Desktops might do the trick a little bit better. And if static images don’t do it for you, Wallpaper Engine can be the best $4 you ever spend, thanks to its marvelous stash of animated wallpapers.

But what about phones? The usual way to apply wallpapers on your device is the same as with a computer — grab whatever image off the web, download it to your phone, and apply it. We have specific instructions on how to apply a wallpaper on iPhone, if you need some more assistance. But in modern times, there are apps for everything, and that includes apps for wallpapers. In fact, there are lots of apps where you can pick something from the app’s directory, and tap it to immediately apply it to your device. One of our favorite apps for that is Backdrops, because of its curated lists and community-contributed wallpapers.

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