Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media. It is both a website where you can search, discover, and learn how to use and attribute media, as well as an openly accessible REST API.
The OpenverseOpenverseOpenverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. team builds the Openverse Catalog, API, and front-end application, as well as integrations between Openverse and WordPress. Follow this site for updates and discussions on the project.
You can also come chat with us in #openverse on the Make WP Chat. We have a weekly developer chat at 15:00 UTC on Mondays.
As 2023 comes to a close, I wanted to take some time to reflect on all that was accomplished in the last year! The below list isn’t exhaustive by any means, but it’s still lovely to look back at how OpenverseOpenverseOpenverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. and the community have changed in the last cycle around the sun.
Early in the year, maintainers and community members undertook an effort to try and stabilize our existing provider DAGs and ensure they could all run consistently and without failures. This also included new ways for reporting and addressing failures internally.
We changed the way the Openverse APIAPIAn API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. is deployedDeployLaunching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. in order to make it easier for maintainers to deployDeployLaunching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. new versions. What was previously 1-hour (or longer) deployment process involving two maintainers is now an automatic process that occurs at the click of a button!
Along with this change, we had a few other significant infrastructure improvements throughout the year:
In order to gain a better understanding of how folks are using Openverse, we implemented event analytics in the frontend. This included the addition of numerous user events, an effort which was assisted by several new contributors!
We modified how popularity for certain results is calculated behind-the-scenes, in an effort to simplify the process and reduce the time it takes for results that get added to the catalog to become available in searches. This trimmed hours off of a weekly data refresh process and reduced the number of errors that we saw with the refresh.
In the final third of 2023, Openverse experienced increase response times for searches across the board. The cause of this was ultimately the increase in both users and data available within our catalog – both great advancements! After several months of hard work, the maintainers were able to pin down a primary source for the slowness and significantly reduce how long it takes to run a search.
Community
In addition to the technical accomplishments from this last year, Openverse also had an impact on (and was impacted by!) the community.
