If you haven’t already, check out my interview with the Flickr man himself, Hamad Darwish.
Desktop wallpapers usually meant one of three things: exotic cars, women in compromising positions, or Bliss. If you were given the job to choose only a handful of images from billions and billions of creatives available today to be part of an operating system’s desktop wallpapers, how would you choose them and which ones would you choose?
That was the daunting task appointed to Microsoft Design’s Jenny Lam, who led the year-long search to find what would become the new set of bundled wallpapers for Windows Vista.
The end result is a stunning set of photographs and art which make up the collections of light auras, textures, paintings and vistas. You might be easily fooled to believe that these are the works of professional photographers who eat camera film for breakfast, lunch and tea, but you’d be wrong. It’s true, some of these photos did come from big stock houses such as Corbis, Getty and National Geographic, but did you also know some came from Flickr and even Microsoft employees?
Some interesting statistics on the selection process:
- About 2/3rds of the collection is licensed from stock houses.
- There are a handful from amateur Flickr photographers (which are Jenny’s favorites).
- Not only did Jenny ask the Flickr photographers if they could license their images, she also sent them on a commissioned photoshoot. You can find some here and here.
- About 5 images came from Microsoft full-time employees.
- Several that were work for hire, where Jenny art-directed a professional photographer on a shoot in Santa Barbara and NYC.
- Evaluated over 10,000 images with over 50GBs of low-resolution images during the round 1 selection process.
This new approach to sourcing and licensing creatives is exciting not only because amateur and enthusiast now have the chance to showcase their works to millions and millions of people - something even the most prestigious art gallery cannot offer, but also recognition of community-driven websites such as Flickr for the ability to deliver quality ‘products’ equal to or even better than from traditional content companies.
Hopefully Microsoft might even consider expanding the program to allow for public submissions of photographs and creatives to be included in future editions of Windows. In a way, “Show us your Wow” is already a test-bed for user-submitted content and community feedback with over 20,000 entires submitted. Of course, there will be certain licensing and legal issues to overcome, but I bet some enthusiasts will do anything to get their works displayed on such a scale.
Certainly interesting times ahead for enthusiasts like Hamad and Thomas Hawk.
Update: Raymond Chen have some other bits about the process.
Update 2: I just did an interview with the Flickr man himself, Hamad Darwish. We talked about his life, Microsoft and his passion for photography.
Comments for "Finding vistas, story of Windows Vista wallpapers"
veridicus
So that’s why they’re calling this version of Windows “vista”…. it’s all starting to make sense now…
Gustav Graves
and the result? they still look like crap compared to what OS X offers!!! They aren’t even in 2560×1600 resolution…
Microsoft oh Microsoft…
zzap
Apple’s wallpapers are very nice; but I wouldn’t say that look crap compared to Vista’s.
DCMonkey
Those two by Hamad are two of my favorties. The 2nd one is my current Vista wallpaper.
Dentaku
Michael Swanson who works at MS photographed the Leaf2 wallpaper http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/default.aspx
He has a bunch more on his website.
Michael
Something is wrong with the Corbis link. Wonderful story about the backgrounds.
rolf
a user asked on our blog:
“one of my favorite wallpapers, the “cherry blossom wallpaper ” was in longhorn 4075, but never made it into vista. does someone know who created the wallpaper or if it is available on the net?”
spayced
“led the year-long search to find what would become the new set of bundled wallpapers for Windows Vista.”
How does it take a year to pick 15 pictures? They aren’t even high resolution. What a huge waste of time and money. I can’t believe someone got paid to do this.
Chris Day
http://www.hamaddarwish.com
Phoenix
The new site looks great!!
Michael
There are nice wallpapers but most of them make it hard to notice your desktop icons. MS also provided some non-photographic wallpapers with Vista, which are not that good I’m afraid.
I decided to make my own and try some other alternatives.
Dré
Fascinating story.
Please disable that bloody Snap Preview abomination.
Long Zheng
@Dre: If you would like to disable Snap Previews, you can click the “Options” link inside a preview pop-out, then click “Disable for this site” or “Disable for all sites”.
Thor
I wonder how many of those 10,000 images were edited on Macs?
Well, it’s good to see all the new Vista components aren’t TOTAL OS X knockoffs the the gadgets (cough) widgets (cough)
Scott
I hope that Microsoft didn’t pull the old “your work will be seen by millions so you should just give us the rights for free” trick. I hope those guys on Flickr got some good cash in return.
Carly
I hope Microsft is doing some cool things to the website and I also hope that Flickr uses my idea.
Saitou Akio
to be honest, i’ve seen many more HDR photos taken by amateur photographers which are certainly much better and certainly much more suited for a desktop wallpaper than those selected by Microsoft, in regards to technical quality and perspective composition.
I sort of have no idea that how could a Microsoft employee who looked through 50 gigabytes of low-resolution photographs would end up selecting this few photographs which certainly doesnt rank up there in comparison.
well, i personally ain’t a fan of HDR photos, IMO, HDR photographers are those lost within the marvels of digital interpretion, HDR photographs are something like CG images, it loses the touch of realism and oftenly seems to portray not realism but instead, fantasy.
Photo Mama (flickr user)
AMEN, Saitou!
i am a photojournalist and i loathe HDR.
if you need to comission some hawaii stuff, i am your woman.
xoxo
New Mac user.
Come on are there really people still using Windows products? Havent we all learned this one?! Zune? You ean iPod? Vista? You mean Mac OSX dont you?!
The day when Microsoft was the ONLY real choice for computer operating systems is coming to a fast close. Macs do it better. Macs dont let you worry about viruses, spyware, pop-ups, blue screens of death….the list goes on. Mac OS X is just plain elegant and powerful. Letting you get your tasks done quickly effeciently, and most of all, just lets you worry about your stuff and not variables like viruses. Never been a virus for Mac OSX, never will be.
Anyway, get with the times people. Anything windows sucks. And sucks bad. Half a decade to upgrade Windows XP?! 4 different versions of the OS?! And costs up to $400?!?! Roflmao! Youre kidding me right? Get Mac’s OS X and just worry about ONE version that does EVRYTHING you need. From A to Z and back again. And the cost? $129. Yep, can you imagine all this technology for under a hundred and fifty bucks? Stop wasting time pople switch to a Mac and stop supporting the copy cat Gates. Who couldnt come up with an orignal idea to save his life.
fredo
my god. I was considering switching to OSX, but the more I read the smug self-righteous opinions of mac people, the more I don’t want to be one of them. Get over yourselves! The fact that you use a certain OS does not make you more intelligent, creative or interesting!
To be more on topic - this is a great story. Kudos to MS for utilizing the creative commons. I’m sure apple wouldn’t consider deigning to use graphics created by non-apple professional designers.
Long Zheng
@New Mac User: Thank you for your wonderful insight into Apple.
Valerie
Bonjour, je vis en france et je voudrais savoir comment faire pour protéger une photo diffusée sur un blog , (dans le cadre de la propriété inteléctuelle), est-il possible de bloquer la fonction impression ou gravure des disques, comment faire? Merci de me répondre, éventuellement me donner les liens qui contribueront à cette réponse, valérie A
yourjeff
I like this wallpaper.
y
运气真好！
Jason
I love how mactards say vista copied Mac widgets, they totally ran their own supporting software designing partner (konfabulator) right into the ground. Mac has copied more than any software company on earth and Steve and his obnoxious followers are always crying about copying. Those who feel guilty of a sin, are the first to judge others of it.
LAME Get over yourself and realize that no one give a crap about your UNIX variant.
joe lackner
viva la flickr! + os x
Matt Sharpe
I don’t like the one with the green foliage in the foreground… makes me feel like im about to fall into very prickly bushes, ouch.
Richard
The reason why it took a year to select the photos is because they needed to find some amateurs who shoot at a high enough quality. They know that many hobbyists do not know or care about getting fair market value for their work so inturn allows them to get photos for a lot less than if they were getting it from a professional business. There’s really no other reason to be searching for stock photos on Flickr.
Daniel
I don’t need a desktop wallpaper as long as I can have a plain, simple and unobtrusive blue background like it was the default with Windows 2000. Thank you & good night!!
Selmer79
I use Hamad’s beach-picture on my desktop and I think it’s great. It has made me want to go out and photograph some vistas myself.
@Gustav Graves: Is the Vista desktop-image program inferior just because the pictures aren’t 2560×1600 (the widescreen images are 1920×1200 which is the 16:10 version of 1920×1080 HDTV resolution). Only the Dell and Apple 30″ widescreen monitors have that high resolution as far as I know, and 30″ monitors is still quite rare.. Maybe we can start whining about the current resolutions being inadequate in a year or two, but not now..
PS: To all the Mac-fanatics here bashing Vista. Mac is a product that speaks for it self. You only do your community a disfavour by trashing Vista. Choice of platform and OS is really down to personal preference now since the difference between OSX, Vista and Linux is really not that great any more. If you want to sell Macs, give a person some time on your Mac and show them what’s great about it instead of dumping grief on the competition.
krust
as always mac users show their imaturity and criticize what they don´t know…
evr_2
It’s no use to use violent insults and/or language. I was once a die hard Microsoft fan as well. This world has choices and people for the most part are free to choose what they prefer to use. Don’t try to force your opinion down anyone’s throat. For the most part, Mac users “aren’t” snobs or self righteous whatsoever. It’s just that those who’ve experienced using Macs, especially OSX for more than just a few hours can see how well thought out it was written and how easy it is to use. This realization only occurs after using OSX for a substantial amount of time so if someone doesn’t agree with you, that’s OK. Get on with your lives. OSX’s performance is also remarkable. However…, it’s not perfect but certainly very close! Nothing is and ever will be perfect however. There “are” viruses for Macs but compared to the # of those compared to the PC platform, is almost non-existent. But as far as what’s available for the general public these days, my “opinion” is that Mac OSX and hardware outshines PCs running Microsoft. On a side note, Microsoft Office for Mac runs beautifully and seemingly more efficiently than the PC version. That too is just my own opinion based on the evidence from using it for almost a year. See? I can say some nice things about both companies. Why argue amongst each other? How childish some people can be. As far as Linux goes, Mac’s OS is a derivative of Linux and within the terminal window, understands many Linux commands. So if anything, Linux should get a lot of credit for stability concerns. The bottom line is to simply “try it” and then make your own choices without biting each other’s heads off.
Artem
Flikr Is amazing. I tried to find some great car photos on Google’s images… It was terrible. Flikr is another business, and the photos in this post are truly prove it.
waqas khan
i think hamad your are a hardworkers..i have seen your pics i really impressed to you.i did’nt know that in windows vista you capture the sights..nice work man..
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