What does FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled tenant property do?

Question

Does anyone know what FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled tenant property is?

Connect-SPOService -Url https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com/
$tenant = Get-SPOTenant
$tenant.FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled

SharePoint Online Documentation isn't super helpful in answering this question. Is there any insight into what this setting is?

Answer 1

When the FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled is set to true, which is the default setting, then any time a content editor is using the modern interface to choose an image, for example, in a "hero" webpart, or simply "image" webpart, they are presented with a dialog that allows the user to choose from "Recent" images, perform a "Web search" for images, look in "OneDrive" for existing images, look in the current "Site", "Upload" a new file from their hard drive, or paste in a "Link" to an existing image. See the following screenshot of the Image Picker with the "Web Search" option selected.

When this setting is set to false, using set-spotenant -FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled $false, the "Web Search" option is no longer visible in this commonly used Image Picker dialog. See the image screenshot below.

Note, that like most tenant-level settings, it can take 5 minutes or more before each site in the tenant picks up the new setting. Also, to see the new value with get-spoTenant immediately after the change, you would need to either start a new PowerShell session or execute disconnect-sponline and then re-connect.

Answer 2

According to the official documentation given for PnP Office 365 CLI at: SPO Tenant Settings Set,

FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled is a boolean property of global tenant settings which Enables file picker external image search.

Allowed values for FilePickerExternalImageSearchEnabled are true and false.