artbip is a free Mac app that puts a different painting on your desktop on the schedule you choose, whole and uncropped: 2,000+ public-domain works from the Met, the Rijksmuseum, the Art Institute of Chicago, other museum open-access collections and Wikimedia Commons.
Years ago I used a wallpaper app that showed a different painting every day. I never studied art, but I came to know pictures I would never have looked up, just by having them behind my windows for a while.
I wanted that again, so I built a native Mac app that keeps the whole painting in view and can tell you what you are looking at. The images come from museum open-access collections and Wikimedia Commons.
It runs in the menu bar, changes the picture on a schedule you pick, and otherwise stays out of the way.
The 2,000+ works, by more than 400 artists, were drawn from 4,653 high-resolution candidates from Wikimedia Commons and five museum open-access programmes, rated for significance and for rewarding long viewing. They run from a Roman wall painting of about 50 BC through Song-dynasty China to 1943, and no artist makes up more than 3% of the mix.
Most wallpaper apps crop paintings to fill the screen. artbip sets the whole painting over a blurred version of itself, or over a flat colour taken from its palette, so portraits and panoramas keep their real proportions.
An optional caption in the corner shows the title, artist and date, set like a museum label. Longer notes live in the app, not on your desktop.
Every work has a museum-style label and a link to its page at the museum. 100 well-known works also have a longer note on the picture, the painter and the period, and every statement in those notes is checked against a museum record or a published source.
Images come straight from the museums' and Wikimedia's own servers, and each of your displays gets its own composition at its exact resolution.
A searchable gallery shows the whole collection. Favourite works, save your own collections, rotate only the ones you choose, block anything permanently, and look up what was on screen last Tuesday.
No account, no analytics, no tracking. artbip talks only to the image hosts and, at most once a day, to GitHub to check for a new version. Once images are cached it works offline. The collection is a readable file that records the public-domain evidence for every work.
The whole collection, scheduled rotation, favourites, collections, the uncropped presentation and the notes are free, with no account, trial or advertising. The code is on GitHub under the MIT licence.
If you would like to support it, you can sponsor artbip on GitHub. Sponsorship unlocks nothing; it just says thanks.
Yes. Every work is public domain or CC0, and artbip records the evidence for each one (the museum's own public-domain flag, or Wikimedia's licence data) along with a link to the source. Works whose US public-domain status is not established are held back.
No. There is no artbip account, server or analytics. It downloads artwork images directly from Wikimedia Commons and the museums' own servers, and at most once a day asks GitHub whether a newer release exists, so corrections to the collection can reach you. That check sends nothing about you, and Settings turns it off. See the privacy policy.
It can rotate artwork already in its cache. New images and update checks need an internet connection.
Very little. It wakes on your chosen interval, composes one image per display, sets it as the wallpaper, and goes back to sleep.
The app and everything in it today are free and will stay that way. Optional extra notes may be offered one day; nothing included now will be put behind a paywall.
No. Artpip was a separate app that set fine-art wallpapers and is no longer available. If you are looking for something that does a similar job, artbip is one option. It is a separate, unaffiliated project.
Choose Report a Problem… in the menu while the picture is on your desktop. It opens a GitHub issue form with the work's details filled in; nothing is sent until you submit it.