Dashboard

Background picture credits

Default background: Clouds (Kamil Porembiński, CC BY-SA) – original 4k, color modified and sky color changed to Nextcloud blue.
Default dark mode background: Pedra azul milky way (Eduardo Neves, CC BY-SA) – original 5k.
Butterfly wing scale (Anatoly Mikhaltsov, CC BY-SA) – original 5k, cropped to use top right and retouched away a bright spot, now 4k.
Cetonia aurata take off composition (Bernie, Public Domain) – original 8k.
Ribbed red metal (Dejan Krsmanovic, CC BY) – original 5k.
Barents bloom (European Space Agency, CC BY-SA) – original 2k (it’s fine since the motive is blurry anyway), rotated 90° right.
Flippity floppity (Hannes Fritz, CC BY-SA) – original 4k, cropped to top left (2k) so the sharp parts are not part of the photo, looks better.
Roulette (Hannes Fritz, CC BY-SA) – original 4k.
Sea spray (Hannes Fritz, CC BY-SA) – original 6k.
New zealand fern (Bernard Spragg, CC0) – original 2.5k.
Pink tapioca bubbles (Rawpixel, CC BY) – original 6k.
Waxing crescent moon (NASA, Public Domain)
Cityscape (Tommy Chau, CC BY) – original 6k.
Lion rock hill (Tommy Chau, CC BY) – original 6k.
Yellow bricks (Lali Masriera, CC BY) – original 4k, color modified for visibility of icons, and slightly cropped on the left so motive is centered.

A reference to why it was very difficult to actually find good background pictures – there are quite some requirements when it comes to picking:

It needs to be an exceptionally good photo of course – since when chosen, people will see it every day.
We need to have a good balance of different motives, e.g. not too many landscape pics.
Same for a good balance of different colors.
The photo needs to work as a background. Photos with objects focused in the middle don’t really work as they will be overlapped by the widgets anyway.
Especially the top part cannot have too much differing contrast, as then it’s not possible to see the navigation icons.
We serve the pictures at 4k resolution and most of the selected images are also available in 6k or higher so it is future-proof.
For the search of course we had to limit to CC0, CC By and CC By-Sa. Only CC0 would have been practically impossible cause there’s just not so many good ones which fit.