Have an HTPC in the living room running Windows Media Center cos it works good enough (so shut up ) and when it goes into 'screensaver' mode... well, I'm sick of seeing the photos my mother took when she came here on holiday..

So what I want are links to picture packs - wallpaper quality (720p) and in the following categories...

Kiting (well duh! :D)
Motorbikes, especially KTM
Hubble photos
Airplanes - WWII fighters, modern jets... esp. A-10s
Stuff like that...

... or am I just going to have to go through galleries and save pics one at a time? :o

I would try P2P apps(kazaa, limewire, frostwire, emule, edonkey)**. They usually have wallpaper collections. If you are lucky you can find kiteboarding, fighter airplanes and motorbikes packs.

Otherwise you may be stuck compiling them yourself.

If you are good at computers/programming you could write a perl script to look for keywords and compile a list for you without much effort.

**not sure which ones are still around

1. Download XNView (you'll be using this to organize, winnow, standard resolutions, etc)
   
2. Download a standalone or plug-in bulk image downloader (BIN) compatibile with your preferred browser. Google will turn up a fair number of free ones.
   
3. Visit Flickr and other sites, and do a keyword search for your images. This will usually display 100-200+ thumbnails at a time.
   
4. Launch your BIN, depending on the one you are using it will download all the fullsize images of the displayed thumbnails, prompting you for a target download directory.
   
5. Some will have an intermediary dialog to deselect some of the images on the page, in case your keyword search retrieves some "false positive" images (i.e. a dog named Hubble, rather than astrophotography images).
   
6. Use XNview to further weed out images and to standardize their resolution.
   
7. Different BINs are compatible with different image services.
   

Hope that helps. Let me know if you run into problems.

ATB,
Sam

Cheers Sam! I'll look into it