Tools and data

Besides the wallpapers, this project produced a few things that may be useful to other people working with fractals.

Every picture in the wallpaper galleries is a place in a fractal and a complete recipe for drawing it there. gallery-locations.jsonl holds all 6,299 of them, one JSON object a line: the fractal family, the center, width, and iteration cap, the rendering mode, the palette and its settings, the collections the picture belongs to, the wallpaper and gallery judges' scores, and a link that opens it in the fractal explorer. The link is the whole recipe, so the explorer, or fractal-engine render-link from fractal-wallpapers, will draw any of them again at any size. The file is licensed CC BY 4.0, like the wallpapers.

The explorer's Deep tab also holds a thousand Random dives. They were found by a procedural dive rather than picked or judged, so they are less useful as a list, and it is easy to make more: python -m builder random-dives --until N in the fractals repository lands new ones until there are N. It needs Node and a Rust toolchain as well as Python.

Palettes

hand-made-palettes.json holds the 495 palettes I made for this project, as color stops. They are released under CC0, so you can use them for anything, with no credit needed. Each one's name matches its strip on the palette library page, and Make your own palettes describes how they were made. The rest of the library came from other sources and is not included.

Judges

The four neural networks that rated locations and wallpapers, ordered the galleries, and chose palettes are released with the fractal-wallpapers code under MIT, as weights-2026-09-14. Each is a MobileNetV4. Three of them take a picture, stretched to 384×224, and return the probability that it would earn at least a 2, a 3, and a 4 on my 1-to-4 scale. The palette judge reads a 224×224 squash of the picture and returns one score, which means something only against the other palettes it's compared with. They were trained on ordinary double-precision pictures, so read their scores on deep zooms with caution. Training judges describes how they were made.

Hand labels

The ratings I gave while training the judges are in the fractal-wallpapers repository under data: locations in data/labels, wallpapers in data/smooth_render and data/strange_render, and gallery grades in data/gallery_grade. A wallpaper or gallery rating is stored with the complete recipe of the picture it rates, and a location rating with the place and the settings it was drawn at. Aesthetic ratings of fractals are rare, so they may be useful on their own.