Book Creator provides a built-in image search that returns over 2 million high-quality and copyright free images using Pixabay and Google SafeSearch to keep students engaged in creating their best work.

Pixabay is a platform of users that share their HD photos and stock images copyright free for others to download. Pixabay uses a mix of automated tools and human moderators to ensure that their SafeSearch content meets the safety requirements outlined in their Terms of Service. Any images flagged by an automated tool or user on Pixabay, are then reviewed by humans, meaning there is a high likelihood that images are safe to use for all ages.

One drawback, however, is that Pixabay has very few images for historic or contemporary people, events, or brands. As an example, searching for 'Rosa Parks' in Pixabay returns no relevant images.

If a teacher or student doesn't find the right image for their project from Pixabay, we then offer a Google image SafeSearch as a secondary option.

Our Google image search has the strictest SafeSearch enabled, just like in Google's own educational products. For additional safety, we also limit the amount of image websites the images are pulled from within Google to only Unsplash, Pexels, Flickr, and Wikimedia. As with Pixabay, all the images returned from the Google SafeSearch are copyright free.

Despite these safety features in place, when offering a wide range of images from third party vendors, there may be rare occasions when an unsuitable image is returned. For context, out of millions of images chosen by students and teachers each month, we have had to globally block approximately 1,000 images total in the last several years. Typically these images are returned from an image search where the images were not tagged appropriately so our internal content filters did not flag them.

With all this in mind, Book Creator offers several additional levels of control for teachers and admins to ensure image searching meets both the needs of the students and digital safety requirements.

Teachers have the ability to manage image search options in the settings for a library. Teachers can choose to turn off Google's image search and just have Pixabay results, or turn off image search altogether. The settings are library specific, meaning the teacher can make some libraries more or less restrictive depending on the students and content needed.

Only teacher and admin users are able to block images using a flag that appears in the bottom right corner of each image search result.

If a student is logs into Book Creator and finds an unsuitable image, they will be unable to flag it themselves.

The teacher or admin will need to login to their teacher Book Creator account, search for the image to flag, and block it instantly for any user on their license. The user image flags get sent to the product development team automatically to enable global image blocks, if necessary.

It is also possible for Admins to turn off Google image search for all teachers and students associated with their organization. We only recommend this as a final resort as it will significantly impact the ability for students and teachers to find images and create books on a wide range of topics. Please contact your Customer Support Manager or the Support Team if you would like to discuss this option.