Microsoft have finally launched Bing in the UK, clearly hoping that goodies like visual search,web page previews and Ciao-powered price comparisons will win your search business. But the most immediately obvious feature remains the spectacular background images, well worth a daily look.

Of course if Google is still your research favourite then you probably won’t be heading Bingwards that often, but there’s no need to miss the images. Run BingPaper and it’ll download and display today’s picture: if you like the shot, click Go and it’ll automatically be set as your wallpaper.

In a particularly neat touch, each image is also saved under your Pictures folder so you can browse your favourites later. By default BingPaper will create a new folder for every month – \Users\<yourname>\Pictures\Bing\2009\11, \Users\<yourname>\Pictures\Bing\2009\12, and so on – but it’s easy to change this to suit your needs. If you’d like to keep all the images in one place, say, then change File Path to read C:\Users\$currentuser$\Pictures\Bing (replacing C: with your system drive) and BingPaper will save them there in future.