Bing Wallpaper is an open-source application which sets your wallpaper as Bing’s image of the day, then keeps it up-to-date.

Download, unzip and run BingWallPaper.exe and it immediately updates your wallpaper, displays a notification and minimises to your system tray.

Right-clicking Bing Wallpaper’s system tray icon displays the image copyright message, and clicking this opens your default browser with the result of a related search.

Our desktop wallpaper was a picture of a giant barrel cactus, for instance, and the search was for its species name, “Echinocactus platyacanthus”, leading us to more images and information.

Leave it running and the program automatically updates your wallpaper every 24 hours. If this doesn’t work for whatever reason, or the wallpaper has been replaced by something else, there’s a “Forced Update” menu option to refresh the image.

Update your desktop with a daily dose of photographic gorgeousness

Bing Wallpaper also offers a “Save” option to conveniently save the picture as a local JPG, although it’s also available at any time as a file called wallpaper.bmp in your system TEMP folder.

Bing Wallpaper is easy to use and the images are great, but we’re not sure it has enough functionality to justify yet another system tray icon and background application.

If you’d prefer something simpler, we stripped out the resident part and recompiled the program as a “simple” version. Run this, it downloads and sets the wallpaper just once, doesn’t display any notification, and closes immediately.

Please note: Windows SmartScreen complained when we downloaded the simple build, most probably because it didn’t exist until a few minutes ago, but it’s entirely safe to use.

Bing Wallpaper and the stripped-back Bing Wallpaper (simple) are available for Windows 7 and later.