|
How to use the Wallpaper Images:
The wallpapers on this site are free for your personal use at home or work. Please see the Terms.
Using an image off of the Internet as your desktop background screen is easy. Most browsers have the ability to take an image you select and place it on your desktop as wallpaper. We have specific instructions below:
 |
Determining your screen's size | |
|
Downloading for Windows 95, 98, Me, NT and 2000 users | |
|
Downloading for Macintosh 8.5+ users | |
|
Some AOL users may need to change their settings |
Click here to close this window
Determining your screen's size |
 |
Your computer's screen size can be determined from it's Display Properties. Alternatively, you can estimate the screen size using our measurements scale page.
Downloading for Windows 95, 98, Me, NT and 2000 users |
|
Select the screen size of your chosen image in the wallpaper galleries that most closely matches your screen's size. Let the image you've chosen load completely on the screen.
Right click on the image and a menu will pop up. Choose "Set as Wallpaper" and the image will be converted to bitmap format (.BMP) and placed in your windows directory. The settings for your desktop will automatically change to the new image, named "Internet Explorer Wallpaper," "Netscape Wallpaper," or something similar.
To further adjust the settings, right click on the desktop, not on a window or icon, and a menu will pop up. Selecting "properties" will bring up your desktop settings (you can also access them from the control panel.) Under the tab "Background" you can set your wallpaper to "Center," "Tile," or "Stretch". With some early versions of Windows you won't be able to stretch to fit.
If your monitor is set to a different size than what is available in the galleries, you will have to use "Stretch" or some other method of resizing the image (sometimes, "Center" looks just as nice.)
Downloading for Macintosh 8.5+ users |
|
Select the screen size of your chosen image in the wallpaper galleries that most closely matches your screen's size. Let the image you've chosen load completely on the screen.
On the Macintosh, (OS 8.5 at least) you can hold down the mouse button on the image you have selected and a menu will pop up. Select the option to "Download image to disk" and save the image somewhere on your hard drive.
Hold down control and click the mouse on the Finder's background. Another menu will pop up and you can select "Change desktop background" at the bottom of that list (You could also select "Appearance" from the Control Panels in the Apple menu.) Under the "desktop" tab, click "Place picture..." If you already have an image on the background, click "Remove picture" first. Go to the location on your hard drive where you saved the image, and hit "Choose". You should be able to use the JPEG format, if not, you will have to use a graphics program to covert the image to TIFF.
In this window you can also select how the image appears on screen. If your screen size doesn't match the image you can scale it using "Scale to screen" or "Fill screen" (sometimes, "Center on screen" looks just as nice.)
Some AOL users may need to change their settings |
|
America Online doesn't trust web designers to compress their graphics for the quickest download time possible. So, it re-compresses the images and shrinks any that are bigger than a 640x400 screen size. The problem is that these graphics are already compressed as much as possible without becoming blurry.
The images on this site are designed for larger screens. If you have an 800x600, 1024x768, or bigger screen, AOL has denied you the benefit of a good download. The saddest part is that re-compressing doesn't really increase speed at all, it just cuts down on what AOL has to send out to you -- it saves AOL bandwidth and cost.
Click here for AOL's explanation
Hope is not completely lost. You can turn off the web compression in your preferences. Here's how:
- Connect to AOL as you normally do
- Click the button on the icon bar at the top of your AOL screen that says, "My AOL" -- it's the one with the little person chasing that AOL image
- Select "Preferences" and another window of buttons will pop up
- Choose the "WWW" button, the one with the rather bland image of the "W" on it
- Yet another window appears, this time with tabs across the top, click the one marked "Web Graphics"
- There it is, uncheck the checkbox, and close out AOL completely (sign off)
- Start AOL again, and experience the web the way it was designed to look