Beautiful Bing Images on Your Computer’s Desktop
Updated  2022-February-14 ❤️

Page contents

News

2021-September-22  Published this evolving⁠[1] article.

 

The desktop metaphor

On a computer, the background screen, which is behind all windows, is often called the desktop. To learn about this metaphor, see Wikipedia.org’s Desktop metaphor.

 

Windows desktop wallpaper

To specify your Windows desktop’s background image, you can right click an open spot on it and choose Personalize. The next section is about using a free/gratis⁠[2] Microsoft app to automatically set your desktop image to a beautiful image from Bing.

To learn more about Windows desktop, see Infinite Ink’s Windows Desktop Shortcuts Give me Quick Access to Anything.

 

Bing Wallpaper app

Starting in April 2020, a Windows user can use Microsoft’s Bing Wallpaper app to automatically set their desktop image to the current Bing image. To install, it follow the “6 easy steps” near the bottom of microsoft.com/bing/bing-wallpaper.

 

💡

  • To choose a fit for your desktop image, right-click your desktop and choose Personalize. The options are Fill, Fit, Stretch, Tile, Center, and Span. When using multiple monitors, Span is cool.⁠🆒

  • If you quit the Bing Wallpaper app, the current Bing image will continue to be your desktop background image (until you choose to change it).

  • You can use one or more of your archived Bing images as your screen-⁠saver photo(s) or your lock-⁠screen slideshow.

  • These Bing images are stored in the following AppData⁠[3] directory.

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local​\Microsoft\BingWallpaperApp\WPImages

 

Linux desktop wallpaper

While trying Linux distributions, I discovered it’s easy to automatically use Bing images as your desktop wallpaper in some Linux distributions.

Here’s what I did in the KDE Plasma desktop environment running on KDE neon, OpenSuse, and Manjaro:

  1. Right-click an open spot on the desktop and choose Configure Desktop and Wallpaper…

  2. In the Wallpaper section, choose the following.

    1. Wallpaper Type: Picture of the Day

    2. Provider: Bing

    Then click ✓ Apply.

If you use multiple monitors, do the above for each monitor.

 

Sample Bing Wallpaper images

The @bing Twitter account tweets Bing images (and other things). Here is an infinity-⁠related Bing-⁠image tweet:

 

And here is the current @bing Twitter timeline:

 

Endnotes

1. Many Infinite Ink articles, including this one, are evergreen and regularly updated.
2. Free/gratis means free as in the phrase “free beer” (i.e., the price is $0).
3. Windows default is to hide the ~\AppData\ directory. To unhide it, click File Explorer’s View menu and check Hidden items and/or Show hidden files, folders, and drives (what you see here depends on what version of Windows you are using).

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