Get images that are trending

If you’re building a user experience that shows images that are trending on social media in different categories, use this API. This API offers an experience similar to bing.com/images/trending.

Calling the API is easy. If you have your subscription key, just send an HTTP GET request to the following endpoint:

https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/images/trending

Here's a cURL example that shows you how to call the endpoint using your subscription key.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/images/trending

For a list of markets that support Trending Images, see Market codes.

Request and response headers

Although that's all the more you need to do to get trending images, Bing does suggest you include a couple of other headers to provide a better experience for your user. Those headers include:

  • User-Agent — Lets Bing know whether needs a mobile or desktop experience.
  • X-MSEdge-ClientID — Provides continuity of experience.
  • X-MSEdge-ClientIP — Provides the user's location for location aware queries.
  • X-Search-Location — Provides the user's location for location aware queries.

The more information you can provide Bing, the better the experience will be for your users. To learn more about these headers, see Request headers.

Here's a cURL example that includes these headers.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" -H "X-MSEdge-ClientID: 00B4230B74496E7A13CC2C1475056FF4" -H "X-MSEdge-ClientIP: 11.22.33.44" -H "X-Search-Location: lat:55;long:-111;re:22" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/29.0.1547.65 Safari/537.36" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/images/trending

Bing returns a couple of headers you should capture.

  • BingAPIs-TraceId — ID that identifies the request in the log file.
  • X-MSEdge-ClientID — The ID that you need to pass in subsequent request to provide continuity of experience.
  • BingAPIs-Market — The market used by Bing for the request.

To learn more about these headers, see Response headers.

Here's a cURL call that returns the response headers. If you want to remove the response data so you can see only the headers, include the -o nul parameter.

curl -D - -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/images/trending

Query parameters

The only query parameter that you should pass is the mkt parameter. Set to the market where the results come from, which is typically the market where the user is making the request from.

You can ignore all other parameters listed in Query parameters.

Here's a cURL example that includes the mkt query parameter.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/images/trending?mkt=en-us

Handling the response

When you send a request to Trending Images API, it returns a TrendingImages object in the response body. The TrendingImages object contains the lists of trending images by category. Use the category's title to group the images in your user experience. The categories may change daily.

{
  "_type": "TrendingImages",
  "categories": [
    {
      "title": "Popular people searches",
      "tiles": [...]
    },
    {
      "title": "Popular animal searches",
      "tiles": [...]
    },
    {
      "title": "Popular nature and landmark searches",
      "tiles": [...]
    },
    {
      "title": "Popular wallpaper searches",
      "tiles": [...]
    },
    {
      "title": "Popular gif searches",
      "tiles": [...]
    }
  ]
}

Each Category object includes the following fields:

  • title — The name of the category. Use the name to group the images in your UX.
  • tiles — A list of Tile objects.

Each tile contains a trending image and options for getting related images. The following example shows what a tile looks like in the JSON response.

        {
          "query": {
            "text": "Red-knobbed hornbill",
            "displayText": "Red-knobbed hornbill",
            "webSearchUrl": "https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Red-knobbed+hornbill..."
          },
          "image": {
            "thumbnailUrl": "https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th?id=OET.c5cf...",
            "contentUrl": "http://contoso.com/2011...",
            "width": 1001,
            "height": 1200,
            "thumbnail": {
              "width": 474,
              "height": 568
            },
            "imageId": "467A365F7E182F8875EB3379B3B1E8DB4FB2C464"
          }
        },

The Image contains the trending image to display on the tile and the Query object contains the option for getting related images.

To get the related images, use the query string in the text field to call Image Search API and display the related images yourself. Or, use the URL in webSearchUrl to take the user to Bing's search results page to see the related images.

If you call Image Search API to get the related images, set the id query parameter to the ID in the imageId field. Specifying the ID ensures that the response contains the image (it is the first image in the response) and its related images. Also, set the q query parameter to the text in the Query object's text field.

The following cURL example shows how to call Image Search API to get the related images.

curl -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: <yourkeygoeshere>" https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/images/search?q=Red-knobbed+hornbill&id=467A365F7E182F8875EB3379B3B1E8DB4FB2C464&mkt=en-us

Next steps