App excursions: Vellum for iPhone, an Art Gallery for Stunning, High-resolution Free Wallpapers

Price: Free, with paid upgrade option | Platform: iPhone | Developer: Merek Davis

I’m a stickler for eye-watering wallpapers. While iOS has a beautiful selection of stock wallpapers, the options are quite limited and can get boring over time. Sure, I can do the good, ol’ scouring the interwebz, but picking one from among an almost limitless option out of Google can become quite a daunting task. Sometimes they’re not even in high-resolution.

Enter Vellum, a free app that offers the wallpaper scouring job for you. Developed by the brilliant mind behind the popular photo editing app for iOS, Merek Davis, Vellum offers a curated selection of high-res wallpapers hand-picked by various digital artists and photographers.

Vellum's main collection selection screen.

When you open Vellum, you are greeted with wallpaper collections that you can look through to your heart’s content. There is also one dedicated Daily Wallpaper gallery that refreshes every 24 hours.

The "art gallery" of wallpaper called Stock & Render by Matt Mills.

Once you selected a collection, you’ll be shown a short paragraph describing the person behind the curation. For some reason this makes seeing each collection feel like visiting an art gallery of each respective artists and photographers. Once you find the wallpaper you like, can save it to your Photos app with a push of a button. Before you do, the app also provides you the option to apply blur (perfect for the home screen) as well as to preview how it looks on the home screen or lock screen. Mind you, the app itself cannot automatically set a wallpaper for you; you have to manually do it via Wallpaper option in the iOS Settings app just as you normally would.

See the one you like? Save it to Photos or blur it beforehand.

Vellum is a solid app about which I have almost no complaints. If I’m being picky, though, the couple milliseconds of time that the Daily Archive takes to load can get annoying, but it’s a pretty minor pet peeve considering how solid the app generally is.

Vellum is a free app for iPhone with a Rp29k ($1.99) premium upgrade options that allows ad removal and access to the Daily Wallpaper archive up to 4 weeks back. Try it and you’ll never have to worry about having the same wallpaper on your phone every single day.