People usually want to find beautiful images at adequate sizes. To do that, they need to search places that offer diverse collections of well rated art-works. Some common wallpaper sources are characterized in this article including image search engines, art galleries and wallpaper sites. These are compared based on factors like: size, diversity, abundance, rating quality.

Search engines

The first place that one could try searching for images would be Google. It returns satisfactory results for text searches, so why wouldn't image search stand up to google's fame?

Search engines index large collections of images. They indeed give sufficiently relevant results for the keywords you search for. But, that's not the real problem here, it's the rating. PageRank, what Google uses, might work well for web-pages, but when it comes to images things change. A highly ranked page may have images from various categories, most of them not displayed for aesthetics.

Art galleries

A good rating requires many people randomly voting or a small dedicated group doing the work. Usually if there are too many images you can't have them all rated by just a couple of guys. This implies the formation of a community of users with the purpose of rating images. The point is, there usually is a community of users that vote for the images. These are no experts mainly. That makes for a random/subjective component in the voting process. It means there is less in-depth examination of the image before voting. Usually images are presented in small sizes (thumbnails) first. Because of this and the shorter time alloted to deciding upon the rating, the images get voted based on their small sizes. Beautiful small size for an image doesn't imply beautiful full size. That's a big problem with sites that have on display many images.

There are lots of image directories, community reviewed mainly, like the ones described above. The most popular that also have a good ranking in-place are presented in figure 1. See end of article for a link. All the characteristics have been established based on the "top ratings" listing on each site. After careful consideration, the best wallpapers site from the ones mentioned is deviantart.com. You won't always find them in the best sizes but at least you get a nice experience from viewing beautiful pictures.

To reiterate, the main problem with gallery sites is poor rating for larger sized images. This problem is more visible when there are fewer reviews for an art-work. It happens especially on flickr where an all-time ranking is not available, so most of the reviews/votes an image gets are on the day it is published.

Wallpaper sites

These don't generally have many images to choose from compared to the previously mentioned sites. The wallpapers here are not ranked as best as they could because there are a lot less users than on gallery sites. Another problem with these is the lack of diversity and abundance. The main advantage is the sizes available. This type of sites have usually the largest resolutions for the images displayed.

Searching for a wallpaper has its trade-offs. You cannot find keyword relevant, good quality, diverse and perfect sized wallpapers all in one source. But in many cases a specific combination of features might do. The type of sites that provide the most features are the large public galleries like deviantart and flickr.