The right image can make a worksheet finally click for a student — but finding one usually means leaving the material you're building, opening tab after tab, and then second-guessing whether you're even allowed to use what you found. TeachersFlow puts images directly inside your teaching materials: you can generate exactly what you need with AI, search a library of free stock photos, or upload your own, and every image you keep is saved in one place to reuse. This guide covers how images work inside the app, the three ways to add one, and the honest limits worth knowing before you lean on it.
Why hunting for images eats your prep time
For most teachers, adding a picture to a handout is a small task that turns into a detour. You leave the document you're writing, open a search engine, scroll through results, and try to judge whether an image is free to use or quietly copyrighted. By the time you've found something usable, downloaded it, and dropped it back into your file, a quick illustration has cost ten minutes and broken your focus.
The friction isn't only time. Licensing is genuinely confusing — a photo that looks free on a search page may not be cleared for a worksheet you hand to a class — and the images you do find end up scattered across your downloads folder, impossible to reuse next year. Keeping the whole process inside the file you're already working on removes both problems at once.
How images work inside TeachersFlow
In TeachersFlow, everything you build for class lives in one workspace called Teaching Materials — a personal library of documents, presentations, and images that you organize in folders and reuse all year. It's less a folder of files and more a workbench: you write a handout in a rich-text editor, build a slide deck, or store a diagram, and it all sits together, ready to pull up or share whenever you need it.
Images aren't a separate tool bolted on the side. While you're editing a document or a presentation, an 'Add an image' panel opens right where your cursor is, with four tabs — Library, Search, Generate, and Upload. Whatever you choose is inserted into the material you're editing and, in most cases, saved to your personal image library — so the picture you add today is one you can reuse next term without hunting for it again. Three of those tabs are ways to bring a new image in:
- Generate with AI — describe an image and create it, for diagrams and illustrations no stock photo has.
- Search free photos — pull a royalty-free photo from a built-in library.
- Upload your own — bring in a file you already have on your device.
Want everything for a lesson in one place?
Teaching Materials keeps your documents, presentations, and images in one organized library you can reuse and share with your classes.
Explore Teaching MaterialsGenerate with AI when the right photo doesn't exist
Some visuals simply aren't out there as a photo — a friendly water-cycle diagram for a fourth-grade worksheet, a simple labelled cell, a cartoon sun for an early-years weather page. The Generate tab is built for exactly these. You describe what you want in plain language — the subject, the style, the audience — and the AI creates it. Each generation uses one AI request, and the result saves straight to your library, so a diagram you make for one lesson is ready to drop into your next worksheet, a slide, or a lesson plan whenever you need it.
Generated images are a starting point, not a finished proof. AI can misspell a label or draw a detail slightly wrong, so give each one a quick look before it goes in front of students — the same review you'd give anything you put on a worksheet.
Search free photos you can actually use
When you need a real photograph — a historical scene, a piece of lab equipment, a landscape for a geography prompt — the Search tab pulls from a library of free, royalty-free stock photos. You type a keyword, preview any result full-screen, then either insert it straight into your material or save it to your library for later. The required photo credit is added for you, so you stay on the right side of licensing without keeping track of it yourself.
Stock photos are the one source that isn't saved automatically — you decide which ones are worth keeping, so your library fills with images you'll genuinely reuse rather than every result you glanced at once.
Upload your own images
Already have the perfect image — a diagram you drew, a photo from a school trip, your department's logo, a scan of a figure you have the rights to use? The Upload tab takes it straight from your device. Add several files at once, and each one saves to your library automatically, ready to insert into the material you're building or any other one later on.
- Supported formats: PNG, JPG, GIF, SVG, and WebP
- Up to 5MB per image, and several at a time
- Every upload is saved to your library for reuse
Which image source to use
All three add an image without leaving your material; the difference is what they're best for and whether they're kept automatically.
| Source | Best for | Saved to your library |
|---|---|---|
| Generate with AI | Diagrams and illustrations that don't exist as a photo | Automatically |
| Search free photos | Real-world photographs of people, places, and objects | When you choose to save it |
| Upload your own | Images you already have on your device | Automatically |
Generate, search, or upload — when each one fits
How to add an image to a teaching material
- 1
Open your material
In Teaching Materials, open the document or presentation you're working on and place your cursor where the image should sit.
- 2
Open the image panel
Choose to add an image, then pick a source tab: Generate, Search, or Upload.
- 3
Create, find, or choose it
Describe an image for the AI, search a keyword for free photos, or pick a file from your device.
- 4
Insert or save it
Insert the image straight into your material, or save it to your library to reuse later.
- 5
Reuse it or share it
Every image you keep lands in your Library tab, filtered by type, tags, or date — and the finished material can be shared with your student groups through a private portal link, with no student accounts required.
One library that keeps working for you
The payoff isn't any single image — it's that they add up. Everything you generate, save from a search, or upload lands in the same image library, where you can tag each one and filter by type, tag, or date. A visual you made in September is easy to find again in March, and because the images sit beside your documents and presentations, last year's worksheet becomes the starting point for this year's instead of a blank page.
Over a term, that library quietly becomes a bank of visuals you trust — cleared for use, already suited to your classes, and one click from whatever you're building next, whether that's a fresh worksheet or a differentiated version for the students who need one. A good picture stops being something you have to go and find twice.
Build your whole lesson in one place
TeachersFlow brings planning, materials, images, assessments, and grading into a single workflow built around how teachers actually work — instead of a dozen open tabs.
Try the materials editor yourself — no signup
This is the real editor from this article, running on sample data. Press play to watch a material come together, then open the live demo and try it yourself.
Frequently asked questions about adding images to teaching materials
Every image in one place, ready to reuse
The visuals that make your materials clearer shouldn't cost ten minutes and three licensing worries each time. With TeachersFlow you generate, find, or upload an image without leaving your material, and keep it in one library you can reuse all year. Start building your next worksheet with images built in.
Sources
Jan Maxa wrote this from firsthand work on TeachersFlow's image library. It describes the feature as it actually works at the time of writing, with the parts of the app it's based on linked below.