I built a simple Python app that emulates what the Bing Wallpaper app does - updates the desktop background to a beautiful new image each day.
Link to the project on GitHub: here
Background
I've been using the Bing Wallpaper app on my Windows computer for many years.
The images are always beautiful, and it's something new and interesting to see every day.
Recently it stopped working on my PC. I tried to uninstall and reinstall, but after some time, I gave up and decided to implement the same functionality with Python.
Why?
The official Microsoft Bing Wallpaper app has some "features" that have annoyed me for a few years:
- Includes features that I don't appreciate, like desktop widgets, Visual Search buttons, and news notifications (all of which you can luckily toggle off)
- When you open a new Chrome window, it opens up the Bing homepage (Annoying feature that you can not toggle off)
- Takes up almost 900MB of disk space (wow!)
How
I used Claude to help prototype a script. It was able to easily get the active desktop's wallpaper to change with something like this
import ctypes
ctypes.windll.user32.SystemParametersInfoW(20, 0, image_file_path, 3)But if you regularly use use multiple Virtual Desktops, this method didn't really work.
We spent considerable time searching for the right registry keys to edit, but long story short, I thought the simplest way to do this was to quickly swap to each of the Virtual Desktops, run the ctypes function, and then swap back. When running, it flickers for about one second, but it's completely acceptable for my purposes.
Conclusion
With coding agents, it's really easy now to clone some functionality from an app that you like - take what's good from it, and leave the rest.
Feel free to try out the app - installation instructions are included on the GitHub, and it should take you less than 2 minutes to set it up. If you run into any issues, feel free to reach out.