If you’ve ever been on the National Geographic Photography site then you already know that they feature some of the best, high quality photographs to be found on the internet. What you may not know, however, is that the site has a special wallpapers section, and that the majority of images in the Photography site are available for download in wallpaper sizes (with a maximum width of at least 1280 pixels for most images, and some are available at 1600 pixels).

Note that there are in fact two different National Geographic URLs with two different wallpaper sections, here and here.

Want to find cool wallpaper? I was recently admiring the wallpaper my friend Jeff (who, incidentally, works for Microsoft) had on his computer. When I asked him about the source he showed me the new cool wallpaper image search provided in Bing. This posting will show you how to use Bing image search to find great wallpaper images.

Seadragon.com from Microsoft Labs is a free web service designed to view, zoom, pan-into, and share large images on the internet without degrading them or otherwise making them smaller.

Dropresize creates a special folder on your machine such that any images placed in this folder are automatically resized as per a predefined height or width and quality setting. This free program is designed for quickly resizing images for the purposes of posting on the internet.

PhotoJoy is a free app that uses your own photo collection to create dynamic
desktop wallpaper, screensavers, and desktop widgets.

PhotoFilmStrip is a free program that can create video from images quickly and easily, including the Ken Burns style zoom-in/zoom-out effect commonly used in documentaries. Other features include the ability to add subtitles, add a soundtrack, and use black and white/sepia versions of your images. PhotoFilmStrip is multiplatform (Windows/Linux).

JacksonPollock.org is a free flash toy that simulates the "action painting" style of American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.

Viewer2 is a free image viewing and tagging app that combines form and function into a powerful program that is a joy to use. It offers an innovative tagging process based on organizing image thumbnails and folders visually and grouping them in various ways that make it very easy to work with and tag them. Includes a powerful, versatile search function that indexes metadata as well as filenames and paths.

PrtScr is a free screen capturing program that combines good functionality with an excellent user experience. It offers much of what you would expect out of a screen capture program within a stylish, visually appealing user interface.

SmillaEnlarger is a free, open source program that enables enlarging/magnifying bitmap images in high quality. Based on original algorithms, this standalone software uses a number of filters that are designed to remove some of the typical artifacts generated by the enlarging process and “fill in” image information to achieve a much higher quality image than image enlargement algorithms typically employed in most applications.

First Impression is a free, lightweight image viewing app that is geared towards utilizing as much of the screen’s real estate as possible for image display without cluttering it with the viewer’s own interface. It manages to do so while providing a nice set of functions, but what I really like about this program is that images are displayed on screen as draggable objects (similar to previously mentioned Vjpeg).

The Twingly screensaver is a free screensaver that displays blog postings visually on a representation of the globe in real time as they are published on the internet.