My first New Years Resolution of 2009 was a very simple one: to get with the program and start using the awesome HiRISE desktop wallpaper images that our excellent webmaster continues to crank out (THANKS!). And you can too, here’s how.

On the New Images page, there’s a link to the latest wallpaper in a variety of common sizes. They’re packaged in zip files; opening the link will allow you to extract them in a folder on your computer. Next, find the settings for your desktop (usually by right-clicking on it). Within the settings, you can have it load an image from the folder and change to a new one, randomly, and periodically (5 minutes seems about right for me). Some people have multiple monitors, possibly in different pixel resolutions, so you could set up a folder for each one.

If you’re browsing our site and come across an image you’re particularly amazed by, many times there will be wallpaper drawn from that image (look on the right sidebar). Our weekly (captioned) releases all have this feature.

Finally, all of the wallpaper to date is available online, including not only the packaged zip files, but directories containing all of the images (to date), for each resolution.

So make a resolution (and determine your screen’s resolution!), grab a bunch of images, and be blown away by the beauty of Mars (at high resolution)!

One of our blog readers asked about the wallpapers we post on our website for some of our released images. If you haven’t seen these, they’re linked over on the lower right of pages like this. Many different sizes are available, from 800×600 all the way up to 2560×1600 (for lucky people with ginormous monitors), so you can choose the right size for your screen resolution.

Our masterful web master creates these wallpapers for each of our weekly captioned releases (these are the images we release each week with some commentary written by the science team). He picks out an interesting area from each image and produces custom cutouts in different sizes. We provide these extra files because we think the images are so beautiful, everyone should have them on their desktop. Because they’re all done by hand, though, we unfortunately don’t have the resources to make these special products for every single image. For example, most of the 1,642 images we released in our big December PDS release don’t have wallpapers. However, you can make your own, and here’s how!
(more…)