Bing — no booing, folks — isn’t the web’s best search engine, but there’s no denying that it has a striking visual presence.
And this is largely down to its use of stunning high-resolution imagery as its background — imagery that changes on a daily basis.
If you like some of the images you come across, and want to use them as desktop wallpaper, Bing makes it easy: it has a ‘save as wallpaper’ option right on its homepage.
These versions come with a giant Bing watermark on them, which is less than ideal. It also means you have to visit the search engine on a daily basis. And no offence — but that’s way more Bing than I want!
No worries. This is Linux. There’s an app that takes the hassle out of the entire process.
Set Bing Image of The Day As Wallpaper on Linux
Bing Wallpaper is a small python script that automatically updates the Linux desktop wallpaper using whatever bing.com has as its image of the day. That’s all it does.
It’s not the first script to perform this job, and I won’t argue that it’s the best, either. But it’s the one I use from time to time when I get bored of my incumbent background but don’t fancy going wallpaper hunting.
The script even stores the images in an accessible location: ~/Pictures/BingWallpapers/ so that you can re-use a favourite at a later date.
Download The Script
First things first: grab the python script from GitHub by clicking this blue download button:
Once it has downloaded, extract the .zip archive and, in the Terminal, run the following commands:
cd ~/Downloads/bing-desktop-wallpaper-changer-master
python main.py
The script automatically does its thing. It fetches the latest Bing (US) background image in high-resolution and sets it as the desktop wallpaper.
If it fails do not panic. You are simply missing a few dependencies. In the Terminal run:
sudo apt install python-lxml python-bs4
Now re-run the script as before. It will complete successfully.
Notes
Run on Start Up
If you want the Bing Wallpaper script to run automatically on startup you can add it to Start Up Applications, entering the following in the command field:
python /path/to/bing/main/py
Not the right picture?
This script will try to detect your location so that it can fetch the correct image-of-the-day for where you live (the US and UK images differ, for example).
If it should fail to detect your location it will fall back to using the US image. This may be why the image set as your desktop background differs from the one in your browser.
But It Is The Right Size
The script uses your screen resolution to fetch the appropriately sized wallpaper from Bing.