Licenses & image sources

Last updated: September 4, 2026

This page explains where the wallpapers on Wallpapers UHD (wallpapersuhd.net, and the apps published as Wallpapers 4K) come from, what you may do with them, and what belongs to us. The Service is operated by Giuseppe Alioto ("we", "us").

Where the wallpapers come from

The catalog has three kinds of content and they are not licensed the same way. Each wallpaper names its own license in the detail panel, next to the author — that line, and the license written into the file itself, are what govern that particular image. Nothing here overrides them.

Our own wallpapers, credited to "Wallpapers UHD" — photographed, processed, upscaled or AI-generated by us — are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may use, share and adapt them, including commercially, as long as you credit Wallpapers UHD and link back. AI-generated ones also carry an AI badge, so you always know what you are looking at.
Creative Commons photography by other people, mostly from Flickr, under several different deeds — CC0, Public Domain Mark, CC BY and CC BY-SA, in their 2.0 and 4.0 forms. The exact one is named per wallpaper. Where the license requires attribution, the photographer's name and a link to their page are shown with the image and written into the file's metadata; where it is share-alike, anything you make from it has to carry the same license.
Public-domain and openly licensed work from Openverse, restricted to CC0 and the Public Domain Mark.

We no longer take wallpapers from stock services such as Pexels or Pixabay: their licenses do not permit redistributing their images as wallpapers, which is what this site is. Older images from those sources remain only where the terms we received them under still allow it.

If we cannot establish an image's license, we do not publish it. In September 2026 we audited the whole catalog against its sources and withdrew every image whose terms we could not state — including images we had every reason to believe were fine, but could not prove. They are not deleted, so they can be restored if the provenance is ever established.

What you can do

Download any wallpaper, at full resolution, without an account and without paying.
Use it as the wallpaper or lock screen of your phone, tablet, computer or TV.
Keep it, re-download it, and use it on as many of your own devices as you like.
Do more than that — publish it, adapt it, use it commercially — when the image's own license allows it. For our own wallpapers it does: CC BY 4.0, with credit. For the rest, the license named on the wallpaper is the answer, and it is the author's to give, not ours.

What you cannot do

These are limits we set, and they apply to the site and to what belongs to us. They do not, and cannot, take away a right an author has already granted you through a Creative Commons license.

Re-publish the catalog, or a substantial part of it, as your own wallpaper site, app, feed or dataset. This is about the collection — its selection and arrangement — not about the individual images, which you may redistribute wherever their own license permits.
Claim authorship of an image, or strip the attribution required by its license.
Present an image as being under terms other than the ones it actually carries.
Scrape the site in bulk with automated tools. The catalog is also available through our apps.

How each file is labelled

Every wallpaper we publish carries its provenance inside the file itself, as standard IPTC/XMP photo metadata (and as container tags on video). Nothing is printed over the picture — there is no watermark, by design.

Wallpapers we made carry our copyright notice, the CC BY 4.0 license as the file's "web statement of rights", and a link back to this page.
Stock wallpapers carry the photographer's name and the provider's license, never our copyright. Where we upscaled a photo, the file says so.
AI-generated wallpapers carry the IPTC "trained algorithmic media" marker, the machine-readable form of the same disclosure the AI badge makes.

If a file's metadata and this page ever disagree, the license named in the file is the one that applies to that file.

What belongs to us

The site itself — its design, code, texts, category structure, and the selection and arrangement of the collection — is © 2026 Giuseppe Alioto, all rights reserved. This includes the database rights in the collection as a whole (Directive 96/9/EC), and it is independent of who holds the copyright in each individual photograph.

Reporting an image

If you are the author or rights holder of an image published here and you want it removed, corrected or credited differently, write to giuseppealioto.info@gmail.com with a link to the wallpaper. We remove disputed content promptly — we would rather lose an image than keep one that should not be here.

See also our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use.