I downloaded and run the Bing daily wallpaper app and love the photos it puts on my PC. Except sometimes. Is there a way when it puts up a picture or photo I don’t like to force it to move to the next image, or even back up to a previous photo?
It’s tempting to say that there are billions of photos online, but the number is undoubtedly far higher. Even when carefully curated by the Bing photos team as wallpaper possibilities, there are still thousands of potential images. My impression is that the team seeks exotic and even somewhat romantic images that look good spread across your computer screen and the Bing.com home page. As you say, though, they don’t always hit a home run, and that’s going to vary by viewer too. My “nah, don’t like it” might well be your “wow, this is stunning”.
The good news is that the Bing daily wallpaper utility does have some controls, including the ability to identify the location of an image (super handy if you do have a “wow, this is stunning” reaction) and the ability to move to previous images in your wallpaper history. You can’t change the Bing.com Web site home wallpaper, but your PC? You’re in control. If you can find those controls…
IDENTIFY THE LOCATION OF A BING WALLPAPER PHOTO
This morning was a great example of good/bad wallpaper photos. I fired up my PC laptop and here’s what I saw:
A pretty gnarled forest, probably appropriate for a Halloween sort of feel, but not really what I want to gaze at throughout the day. But how do I change it? For that matter, where is this creepy spot?
To find the Bing app icon, have a close look at your Taskbar:
My Bing Wallpaper app icon is hidden on the overflow shortcuts “^” button (I’ll show you how to fix that in a minute!) with the barely legible stylized lowercase ‘b’. Thank goodness for ToolTips or I’d never know what most of these shortcut icons mean, actually.
In this instance, a click on the Bing Wallpaper shortcut icon and a menu appears!
Most importantly, it identifies the provenance of the photo: The Fanal Forest, Madeira Island, Portugal. [find it on a map] Cool.
HOW TO CHANGE BING WALLPAPER PHOTOS
You can also see on the menu the arrows adjacent to “Change Wallpaper“. A click and it’s a breeze to back up to the previous day’s image:
This beautiful autumn photo – much more my speed for today – is from Farra di Soligo, Veneto, Italy [find it on a map]. A big improvement to me, easily accomplished.
Notice that you can also disable the automatic updates by turning off “Enable daily refresh“.
Don’t have Bing Wallpaper? You can grab a copy at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/bing-wallpaper
WHAT ABOUT BING.COM WALLPAPER?
Remember, however, that this doesn’t let you change the matching image that will show up as the background on Bing.com for the day:
If you really hate it, maybe you can try using Google.com for the day? 🙂
MOVING OVERFLOW SHORTCUT ICONS TO THE TOOLBAR
I also promised I’d tell you how to move those overflow shortcut icons to your Toolbar. Ready for the tip? Just drag ’em on. Really, it’s that easy. With just a few seconds of work I can get rid of that confusing “^” entirely and have the Bing Wallpaper icon right on the Taskbar, ready for a click at any time:
Much easier, if you ask me.
Helpful Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows for many years and have an extensive Windows 10 & Windows 11 help area. Please check it out to find lots of additional tutorials and guides while you’re here. Thanks!
Thanks for the advice. I like Bing Wallpaper. However, it doesn’t allow one to push forward, apparently. And it only allows a change to be made from the previous week of images. Sigh!
You, sir, are my hero. I have suffered through DOZENS of horribly distracting wallpapers. I only put up with it because every few days there are simply STUNNING wallpapers that I wouldn’t otherwise discover on my own, and I love the change of pace. But I often wonder who is approving some of these wallpapers. They do realize how distracting and downright ugly some of these images are? Alas, your wisdom with two simple clicks has taken me back to a wonderful wallpaper until things refresh tomorrow. Thank you, thank you!
Daily refresh of bing wallpaper fails a lot. And there seem to be a zillion explanations for the failures and barely anything that works to fix the problem. I am so frustrated.