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.
Amazing app man! Love the facts bar!
Hehe, this is handy long
i agree the images are just too good to be wasted.
What would make this really awesome is if on a monthly or quarterly basis these collections were turned into Windows 7 Theme Packs!
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.
An RSS feed could be useful to create Windows 7 Slideshow Themes.
Lovely photos. Absolutely lovely.
And happy graduation.
Great job ..and yes…..beutiful pictures
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!
@bernard: Thanks, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just start with what Bing offers.
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.
Awesome. Now can you please make the images available over RSS? And a Windows 7 theme that makes use of the RSS images.
I agree with everyone else, an RSS feed so it can integrate with Windows 7 would be very, very awesome.
Awesome work, Long. And I agree that an RSS feed would be wonderful
Anything photo smaller than 1280 x ____ is criminal. Microsoft, make the images high-res please. Nice work, Long.
And there’s even annotations on the ‘barrier rief pic young man, grrreet.
PS: http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages/?m=2&y=1985
Hey Long I just noticed that you typeset the words “image archive’ in Helvetica Light.
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.
Any word on whether you’ll provide an RSS feed?
It looks much better than the Google image search.
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.
@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.
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?
@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.
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!
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!
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
Hi again,
Something wrong with the Bing Image Archive since 8/21?
Is there an RSS feed for just the us images?
@bigP: Thanks for the suggestion. I might add that functionality soon.
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.
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
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.
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
I agree with Bas. I would like to be able to filter only the US Bing images because of the duplicates.
I also agree with Bas and Matt. A filter of some sort would be useful for the duplicate images in Bing (especially if this filter was for the U.S., since the captions are the clearest.
I love the Bing Image Archive – WONDERFUL idea and very nice job – keep it up