I started contributing to the WordPress Photo Directory back in August 2023 and alongside Jonathan Desrosiers and Jeff Golenski have a friendly challenge going in 2024 to competitively contribute to the Photo Directory. I will try and post monthly recaps to “keep myself honest” this year, so let’s get started with results from my January submissions!
Jonathan is keeping record of photos of his that get accepted, rejected, or are still pending, but I’m going to take a simpler route and just track ones that are accepted. Before January, I had 2 photos accepted and as the month wraps up that number has increased by 12 to 14 photos in the directory.
The following images have been synced to Openverse and thus easier to embed via the Image block’s “Select Image” flow to embed images from Openverse. As Jonathan noted there’s a delay from when images are approved and appear in the WordPress Photo Directory and when they sync over to Openverse; it used to be a monthly sync and has been updated to weekly, but would seem that a daily (or even hourly or real-time) sync would help. That way folks who contribute to the Photo Directory could most easily utilize those images right away in their own posts (and others would more quickly benefit from the additional photo content as well).
The following photos are ones that are also accepted to the Photo Directory, but have not yet synced to Openverse so I’m attaching these by their Photo Directory image URLs and manually adding the attribution as the photo caption. Yes, its inconvenient. Also inconvenient that the Photo Directory oEmbed looks super wonky, which is better than the fact that respective Openverse images don’t have an oEmbed at all. 🤷
There are some user experiences I don’t like about submitting to the Photo Directory, about searching for Openverse images (via the Image block and differently via the Block Inserter), about the lack of Openverse oEmbed support, and about how images are (or are not) ingested into the Media Library. I’ll work on a follow-up post about those in hopes I might be able to get some of those things a bit more polished for a nicer publishing experience next month. Until then, submit those photos folks!
P.S. – that featured image came from Openverse in searching for “January” and is Harper’s January by Boston Public Library is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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