I know that there are lots of wallpaper images included in Microsoft Windows 8, but I’d like to have my own images. So what’s an easy way to find images and set them as my wallpaper in Win8?
That’s a fun question because it turns out that Windows 8 makes it really easy to change your desktop wallpaper image, even from within Internet Explorer. I mean, without even leaving the browser easy.
And while a few years ago it was hard to find cool images, there are now so many millions of beautiful photographs on the Internet that there’s no excuse not to have beautiful imagery on your computer to improve your aesthetic experience.
Better yet, image search lets you also specify images greater than a certain size so worries about picking a graphic that’s too small for your screen are easily alleviated.
Let’s start with Bing Image Search since it’s a very slick interface.
It’ll look like this:
In my experience, you can just type in a few words that describe the kind of images you seek, but let’s be a bit more loquacious and instead search for “tropical beach sunset“.
The results look like this:
You can scroll around and look at the images, but let’s start by filtering the search to omit small image files.
This is done by clicking on the “Size” link on the top left. A click and you see the options:
You can use “Wallpaper” if you want but I just use “Large” and it seems to work great.
Choose the size you’d like, then scroll down to find that one perfect photo or image.
Here’s the one I picked:
Beautiful, eh?
Click on the image to make it larger on screen:
See the “Show larger” icon on the lower right.
Click on it.
Now right-click anywhere in the image and you’ll get the context menu:
Choose “Set as background” and you’re just about done.
Just need to confirm:
You do?
Amazing!
Click “Yes” and your wallpaper suddenly changes to the image you’ve selected:
And how can you not love that as a desktop wallpaper? Gorgeous.
Now, a caveat: doing an image search doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get images that are legal and allowing public or commercial use. For your own personal use, however, it’s fine.