istartedsomething

Bing Image Archive, for your viewing pleasure

June 10th, 2009 AEST by Long Zheng
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Bing Image Archive

Whilst NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) sets the bar pretty high, Bing.com’s daily photograph backgrounds are also worth taking a look. Of course not everyone uses or want to use Bing everyday, easily missing out on some amazing pictures. Granted there is a little navigator on the site giving you past 7 days’ photos, but it’s clumsy and time-consuming. Therefore without further ado, I present, the Bing Image Archive.

Here, you can find all background images from Bing presented in a simple calendar format, appropriate to the day which the image was originally displayed on. As you might have noticed, there are two photos per day, one of which is for United States and the other for everywhere else. Notably, the US image comes with richer metadata and hotspots which I’ve also transferred from the site to give you a better understanding behind the image.

The site also allows you to send permalinks of images by copying the URL, for example. Enjoy.

35 Comments

  1. DjFlush

    Jun 10th, 2009 at 10:02 pm

    Amazing app man! Love the facts bar!

  2. daemonx

    Jun 10th, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    Hehe, this is handy long :D i agree the images are just too good to be wasted.

  3. GoodThings2Life

    Jun 10th, 2009 at 11:07 pm

    What would make this really awesome is if on a monthly or quarterly basis these collections were turned into Windows 7 Theme Packs! :)

  4. Long Zheng

    Jun 10th, 2009 at 11:09 pm

    A lot of people have asked in regards to wallpapers, I think their small resolution and quality aren’t going to be adequate for most people’s resolutions. I am however thinking of adding a RSS feed.

  5. Imran Hussain

    Jun 10th, 2009 at 11:17 pm

    An RSS feed could be useful to create Windows 7 Slideshow Themes. :)

  6. sw

    Jun 10th, 2009 at 11:23 pm

    Lovely photos. Absolutely lovely.

    And happy graduation.

  7. Binger

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 12:43 am

    Great job ..and yes…..beutiful pictures

  8. bernard

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 12:56 am

    Hello. I noticed you haven’t gone back as far back as last year yet. Dunno if you’ve saved daily images that far back, but in case you haven’t, I have a Flickr photo set of when Live Search had daily photos of the Summer Games in Beijing. Just click the link in my comment’s username. Unfortunately I didn’t think of saving the dates along with the pictures, but it’s something that can probably be deduced by analyzing the metadata or by the content of the picture.

    Hope this helps!

  9. Long Zheng

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 12:58 am

    @bernard: Thanks, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just start with what Bing offers.

  10. GoodThings2Life

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 1:53 am

    Long Zheng,

    The low resolution issue is easy… just set the wallpaper mode to “Center” instead of “Stretch” with a Bing-like background color and then it looks just like on the Bing site anyway, lol.

  11. Greisha

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 4:08 am

    Awesome. Now can you please make the images available over RSS? And a Windows 7 theme that makes use of the RSS images.

  12. Sam

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 5:15 am

    I agree with everyone else, an RSS feed so it can integrate with Windows 7 would be very, very awesome.

  13. Yipcanjo

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 9:10 am

    Awesome work, Long. And I agree that an RSS feed would be wonderful :)

  14. someone

    Jun 11th, 2009 at 11:01 pm

    Anything photo smaller than 1280 x ____ is criminal. Microsoft, make the images high-res please. Nice work, Long.

  15. xaml

    Jun 12th, 2009 at 11:00 am

    And there’s even annotations on the ‘barrier rief pic young man, grrreet.

  16. xaml

    Jun 12th, 2009 at 11:03 am

    PS: http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages/?m=2&y=1985

  17. PortalCake

    Jun 14th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

    Hey Long I just noticed that you typeset the words “image archive’ in Helvetica Light.

  18. Frank

    Jun 15th, 2009 at 9:40 pm

    U should look up copyright on wikipedia. Man these images are from big ass companies like Getty images. Beleive me you don#t want to get in touch with their legal people.

  19. Sam

    Jun 16th, 2009 at 4:22 am

    Any word on whether you’ll provide an RSS feed?

  20. Technology Slice

    Jun 17th, 2009 at 12:42 pm

    It looks much better than the Google image search.

  21. sum1

    Jun 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am

    Hi, thanks for your great work!
    But… what a pity that I found the pictures in your collection were modified ones. Compared with the originals, the file size increased a lot (though you cropped the bottom strip in the earlier ones) but the quality decreased (note the sky area in my screenshot).
    http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/8696/bingistartedsomethingbc.jpg

    Fortunately you kept all the original filenames. So I can go download the originals from bing.com (e.g. http://www.bing.com/fd/hpk2/HorseheadNebula_EN-US1846128122.jpg ). Thanks again! But how about optimizing your script or something so that we can also get the originals from your site?

    It’s great you reproduced the © notes! But I cannot see the hotspot things on many pictures (e.g. http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages/#20090601-us ). Something not stable? Or my browser’s problem?

    I really hope you will have time to make a Live collection somehow. Since Live “evolved” into Bing, we cannot get the original URLs of Live backgrounds any more.

  22. Long Zheng

    Jun 21st, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    @sum1: Unfortunately because JPG is a lossless format, when I crop it and resave it, some quality is lost. I try to use the least amount of compression on the new picture (thus increased file size) to mitigate any further quality losses.

    The hotspots should appear when you hover over the text at the bottom. :)

  23. sum1

    Jun 22nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm

    Yes, different tools result in different JPG, even though the best quality factor is chosen.
    Why not just simply leave the pictures intact? I don’t think it’s necessary to crop them. And since June 10, it seems there’s no bottom strip any more.

    I can see all the elements on some pictures (e.g. #20090603-us). But on the others (e.g. #20090601-us), I can only see the © note and the X button, no hotspot or the link text, no matter how I move the mouse or refresh the page. Any advice?

  24. Long Zheng

    Jun 22nd, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    @sum1: If the hotspots are showing up for some pictures and not others, then your resolution might not be big enough. It calculates based on how much text there is, the vertical resolution necessary. And if your screen resolution is too small, it’ll hide the info.

  25. sum1

    Jun 23rd, 2009 at 10:14 am

    Aaah, I kept too many tabs open in my browser. After I toggled off the tab bar (multi-line), everything was there then. Thanks for the hint! :D

  26. johnmcclain77

    Aug 6th, 2009 at 5:05 am

    Could you add an RSS feature that we could then embed into a theme? As I’m sure you know Windows 7 allows Desktop Themes to pull from an RSS feed. It would be a really cool feature to offer an RSS of all the different Bing photos.

    Thanks!

  27. Edison

    Aug 6th, 2009 at 11:29 am

    Thanks for all of your work on this. It’s a nice treat to come and visit regularly. The recent changes are a plus! I just wish Microsoft would label the images better.

    Edison
    Toronto, ON

  28. sum1

    Aug 24th, 2009 at 4:43 am

    Hi again,
    Something wrong with the Bing Image Archive since 8/21?

  29. bigP

    Sep 23rd, 2009 at 9:35 pm

    Is there an RSS feed for just the us images?

  30. Long Zheng

    Sep 23rd, 2009 at 9:36 pm

    @bigP: Thanks for the suggestion. I might add that functionality soon.

  31. Cyn

    Oct 14th, 2009 at 1:00 am

    Thanks for your website.
    Bing has brought to me some AMAZING pictures.
    Now, your site has given me access to past pictures to enjoy at my leisure.

  32. bill

    Oct 14th, 2009 at 5:42 am

    Any way to search past daily Bing images? For example, say i want to search for any past daily Bing images of New Zealand, or of Jugglers. Thanks! -bil

  33. Bas

    Oct 31st, 2009 at 9:05 pm

    Can I also filter the RSS stream only to show the images for one country? When using your RSS feed for a desktop slideshow on Windows 7 I get a lot of duplicate images since all countries are included in the RSS.

  34. erol

    Nov 13th, 2009 at 1:03 am

    an RSS feed would be absolutely amazing. I’m not sure how you pulled this off… been trying for a week now.

    it would help a lot of people very much

    thanks

  35. Matt

    Nov 20th, 2009 at 4:07 am

    I agree with Bas. I would like to be able to filter only the US Bing images because of the duplicates.

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