Block Adult Content on Pixabay at Your School or Workplace

All images and videos on Pixabay are manually approved, so you will not find any strong violence and/or adult oriented contents here. However, we do accept nude photography and other visual contents that might be considered offensive to some reasonable degree. In order to filter out these search results, you can make use of our SafeSearch filter. We do offer four different ways of enabling or enforcing SafeSearch on Pixabay.

Turn SafeSearch on/off for your browser

You can turn SafeSearch on/off for your own browser by toggling a check box in the search results settings as shown in the following screen capture:

The same setting is also accessible on our FAQ page. It makes use of a cookie stored in your browser. Therefore, the setting is bound exclusively to your currently used device and browser.

Lock SafeSearch permanently for your browser

If you want to turn on SafeSearch permanently and disable the possibility to toggle this setting on the website, you can simply open Pixabay's home page or any search results page with an additional GET parameter called "safesearch". Example URL: https://pixabay.com/?safesearch

This will set a permanent cookie in your browser and it will also render the option to disable SafeSearch on the site inaccessible. If you want to disable SafeSearch, you need to remove the cookie from your browser, which is typically done by clearing the browser's history and cache.

This option is recommended in schools and work environments for those who don't have a technical background or if you don't have access to your network/router software. As a teacher, you can create a shortened URL that contains the GET parameter and hand this URL to your students.

Enforce SafeSearch for your network

This option will force all users on your network to have SafeSearch enabled on Pixabay while still allowing a secure connection via HTTPS; however, it requires some technical expertise and access to your network configuration.

To force SafeSearch for your network, you'll need to update your DNS configuration. Set the DNS entry for pixabay.com to be a CNAME for safesearch.pixabay.com. We return SafeSearch results for all requests that we receive on this subdomain.

If you cannot create a CNAME entry, you may alternatively block/blacklist the entire domain pixabay.com and ask your students/workers to open safesearch.pixabay.com directly in their browser. In this case, users are prompted for a username and password. Enter "guest" as username and password to gain access.

If you have SafeSearch turned on, but your search results still contain adult material, you can report the offensive content through the flag symbol next to the concerned image/video: