Awesome ‘Hot Babe’ Wallpaper

I just had to share this. I think this is actually the first computer wallpaper I have shared in almost two years of posting; but I could be wrong (I can’t actually remember and I can’t be bothered going back through all those postings to check).

I know this picture has been around on a lot of the sites and about a two weeks ago it featured on Digg but the copy linked on Digg was only a 260KB 500y sized picture and was useless for use as a wallpaper.

Well I was recently e-mailed the full resolution 1680x1050 1.5MB wallpaper version and I am going to share it, but it was not easy. At first I thought I would just upload it to SquareSpace and share it from there, but as it happens SquareSpace does some unwanted compression and when you get the file back from SquareSpace it has been reduced in size to 726KB with a corresponding slight loss of clarity and resolution.

So I tried Flickr, but Flickr also re-compresses down large images. In the end I created a SmugMug account because my testing of SmugMug indicates that they don’t do compression on your behalf whether you ask for it or not. SmugMug is not free. They charge $40 per annum but I guess if you want better picture hosting you have to pay for it and I certainly do not want images resampled, resized, or further compressed when I upload them. Any resampling, resizing, or compression will have been done by ME exactly as I want it before I do the upload—thank you very much.

So now, somewhat without planning it, I suddenly have a SmugMug account.

Okay. To get the FULL 1.5MB 1680x1050 version of the wallpaper click on the picture above. This will take you to the picture at SmugMug in my Wallpapers gallery. Then click on “Save Photo” at the top of the screen and SmugMug will let you save the picture in its full size and resolution (because I have allowed Public access to this Gallery). For those on slow links (such as satellite links in country areas of Australia) note that this download might take a few minutes as it is a 1.5MB file. For those with ADSL2 it will take about a eight seconds .

Once you have it saved on your computer you can use almost any image viewer utility to set it as your desktop wallpaper. If you don’t already have a good image viewer I strongly recommend IrfanView.

Let me know if it doesn’t work. I hacked this together just now. But I did test it and it seems to work okay.