Yeah yeah yeah, I’m hella delayed on this post and instead of tacking on August I’m going with May-June following on from March & April’s joint post to get caught up on my contributions to the WordPress Photo Directory. Before May, I had 62 photos accepted and as the month of July wrapped up that number has increased by 43 to 105 photos in the directory.
The following images of my March and April contributions have been synced to Openverse (and thus easier to embed via the Image block’s “Select Image” flow to embed images from Openverse).
P.S. – this post’s featured image comes from Openverse in searching for “March April” and is “Forgotten Blossoms” by halfrain and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
February also included the new WordPress Photo Festival event, a global online photography competition organized by the WordPress Community of Kerala, India. The event ran from February 3rd to February 9th, 6:00pm IST and captured photos from participants around the world who uploaded them to the official WordPress Photo Directory using the #WPKeralaPhotos hashtag. 1,544 photos from 163 contributors were submitted to the WordPress Photo Directory during the event. The five best, unique entries each received a USD$100 prize, five additional folks received a consolation USD$50 prize, the three participants with the most number of photos received a USD$100 prize, and three additional participants also received a USD$50 prize (see all winners here).
I definitely stepped up my photo contributions during the event, ensuring that as quickly as any of my submissions were accepted/rejected that I submitted another photo. I’m pleased to have come in 26th place with 14 photos contributed to the event!
The following images of my February contributions have been synced to Openverse (and thus easier to embed via the Image block’s “Select Image” flow to embed images from Openverse).
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!
Josepha Haden lead a panel discussion at WordCamp Montclair earlier this summer with Michelle Frechette, Courtney Robertson, and Ebonie Butler on the topic of the all women and non-binary release squad in WordPress 5.6 (aka “Simone”) and their individual and shared experiences contributing to WordPress. One of my favorite parts was when Josepha stresses what should already be a certainty, but unfortunately one that still bears repeating (and amplifying); namely that contributions from anyone should always be welcome.
The clip below highlights that part of the panel discussion and shows off Josepha’s wonderfully quirky approach storytelling. Please watch and consider sharing in your networks so we can ensure this approach to welcoming all contributions spreads as widely as possible.
