Bing Wallpaper

There’s a good chance you may be one of those people who put a great emphasis on what’s displayed on his or her computer’s desktop. Considering just how much time we spend in front of our computers nowadays, the argument that our virtual surroundings shape our mood and can potentially have massive impacts when it comes to productivity and even our well-being is now more real than ever.

Granted, there’s an endless supply of awesome wallpapers available online, however, finding the right one can take time, and possibly even a lot of patience. That said, if you’re not afraid of meeting your wanderlust face to face each day, then Bing Wallpaper is definitely something that you will enjoy.

Being an official Microsoft product, Bing Wallpaper promises to bring to your desktop high-quality images (the same ones being displayed on the Bing homepage every day). For those of you who don’t know, Bing boasts an impressive collection of beautiful images from around the world, and that’s exactly what you’ll get with this app.

Better yet, it’s also a good way to improve your general knowledge about the world’s geography since the app tells you the exact location of each photo. It’s a very nice way to explore and “discover” a new place each day.

Other than that, the app is very well-made. It’s very unobtrusive (it lives in the system tray), it’s super user-friendly, it has a minimalist and quite stylish GUI, the wallpapers it brings are nothing short of stunning, and it also provides you with a quick way of searching for the locations of the photos it displays. But, there’s a small catch.

While the overall quality of the app is top-notch, we have to mention the fact that the app is built on a “pretty pictures are just the beginning” type of marketing philosophy. To be more precise, when you first install the app, it offers to set Bing as your homepage, as well as make Bing the default search provider on your browser (regardless of what browser you’re using: Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Google Chrome).

Thankfully, you can opt to keep all your browser settings intact, and just install the app for the purpose of having a new beautiful wallpaper each day. Sadly, there’s no way of turning off the so-called “suggestions” the app brings in your browser. For example, if your computer runs Chrome, you’ll encounter a small message asking you to install the Bing Wallpaper browser extension from time to time. Oh, one more thing: clicking the current image’s location (displayed in the upper part of the GUI) automatically brings up a Bing search session in your browser.

To conclude, Bing Wallpaper is an interesting application that brings amazing pictures to your desktop with almost no effort on your part. If there weren’t so many Bing references, we would have deemed the app absolutely wonderful.

Still, that’s not to say that the app forces you to install anything so, at the end of the day, it’s your call if you want to take advantage of what Bing has to offer or not. To be fair, all its potential shortcomings are in no way deal-breakers and it’s still a good app that we totally recommend.