Where Stock Photos in the Image Picker Come From

The image picker inside Piskes Website Builder searches stock photo libraries — Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash — directly from the editor, so you can find and drop in a photo without leaving the page you're building. Here's exactly how that works, including a detail we think is worth stating plainly.

Three providers, three keys

Each of the three sources requires its own API key, configured per deployment. Searching "office" with Pixabay selected queries Pixabay specifically; switching providers switches which library you're searching.

An honest answer when a provider isn't configured

Until recently, if a deployment didn't have a given provider's key set, a search against it simply returned zero results — a 200 response with an empty list, indistinguishable from a search that genuinely found nothing. That's a bad way to fail: someone would try a different search term, then another, and reasonably conclude the picker was broken rather than that one provider simply wasn't switched on.

That's fixed. An unconfigured provider now returns a real 501 Not Implemented, with a response body that names the specific provider and the environment variable an administrator needs to set to enable it. The request wasn't wrong — the server just has no implementation to offer for it, and now says so.

Why this is worth knowing

If a search in the image picker comes back empty, it's a real empty result — the provider is configured and genuinely found nothing for that term. If it errors instead, the answer to "why" is in the response itself, not something you have to ask support to explain.