Get the Bing image of the day as your wallpaper – daily, automatically

20 March 2016, 02:36


Microsoft isn’t the laughing stock it used to be. It even does things many admire. One of its most popular features is the Bing Homepage Image, which is a beautiful wallpaper image that’s replaced everyday. If you have a Surface tablet then this appears as your wallpaper, and it appears behind the Bing.com search page too.

Now you can have it as your Mac’s wallpaper. It’ll change every day and it’s easy to setup. (Note that we’re using here the US Bing wallpaper image, and those for other countries can vary.)

  1. The tiny app that’ll do the hard work for us is BingBackground, and it was created by developer josueespinosa. Click here to download it.
  2. Drag the downloaded app to your Applications list, then right-click it and select Open, then select Open in the dialog box that appears. You’ll find the wallpaper changes instantly and in theory you could simply run the app manually every day to get the latest Bing wallpaper. But we’re going to automate it.
  3. Open a Terminal window, which you’ll find in the Utilities list of Applications, and paste in the following before hitting Enter: 
    crontab -e
  4. This will open an editing window in the Terminal window. Tap the I key to switch to insert mode, then paste in the following: 
    30 12 * * * /Applications/BingBackground
  5. In the Terminal window, tap Esc and then type the following to save and quit the file: 
    :wq
  6. You can now close the Terminal window.

The wallpaper will now change at 12.30pm every day. The wallpaper images get stored in a Bing Backgrounds folder within your Pictures folder.

If you ever want to turn off the Bing wallpaper switching, again open a Terminal window and type the following:

crontab -r

Then choose a different wallpaper image in the usual way by right-clicking the desktop and selecting Change Desktop Background. You can also trash the BingBackground app if you wish.


Leave a comment...

Good afternoon,

I tried to use this BingBackground software, and had some problems. Could you please help with this issue? Thanks a lot.

After I run BingBackground, my MacBook Pro has the following problems:
1. The “dock” disappear. It does not show no matter how I change the System Preferences.
2. The desktop is black (without any background picture). Changing the System Preferences does not have effects on the desktop.
3. The minimize button does not work for all the windows.

Could you please let me know how to fix these problems? or restore the system to the default settings? Thank you.

My OS is macOS Mojave (version 10.14.5), and computer is MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017).

I downloaded this software from: http://www.mackungfu.org/get-the-bing-image-of-the-day-as-your-wallpaper-daily-automatically

After I run BingBackground, the following info show on the screen:
———————
$ /Applications/BingBackground ; exit;
Downloading JSON…
No background for 1920*1011 was found.
Using 1920*1080 instead.
Downloading background…
Saving background…
Setting background…
logout
Saving session…
…copying shared history…
…saving history…truncating history files…
…completed.
Deleting expired sessions…92 completed.

[Process completed]
—————————

I also found that the Bing picture was downloaded and put under the directory: Pictures/Bing Backgrounds/

The help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much!

Best regards,
Xiangyu

— Xiangyu Luo · Jul 9, 01:50 PM · #

i have the same problem

— Ryland O'Quinn · Dec 6, 12:40 PM · #

 
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