Introducing Dark Mode

If you often browse in low-light conditions, OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. now offers a dark mode for the whole site. You can switch between light and dark or let it follow your device’s settings automatically.

We’ve expanded the brand colors and refined the gray palette to maintain the Openverse identity while improving readability. These changes ensure a consistent look, meet accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility) contrast requirements, and adapt to your device’s color settings for a seamless experience.

As with all Openverse development, this feature’s planning and progress took place entirely in public on GitHub. If you want to stay informed about what we’re working on next, you can follow the Openverse Project Tracker.

This feature falls under the efforts of improving the browsing experience and keeping a user-centric approach to how Openverse is shaped.

If you notice and bugs or functionality you would like to see in the dark or light theme, please report an issue on the Openverse GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repository or reach out to our maintainers in the #openverse channel of the Make WP Chat. Thank you! Special thanks to @fcoveram for designing the new themes, and to @zackkrida, @dhruvkb and @olgabulat for implementing them.

Visit openverse.org and select your preferred theme from the site footer.

#announcement, #openverse

The Openverse API is moving to api.openverse.org

Note: This change is now live after making adjustments to exclude requests from the media inserter from redirection. Earlier, this change was deployedDeploy Launching code from a local development environment to the production web server, so that it's available to visitors. at around 00:41 UTC on Monday June 3 but reverted at 14:00 UTC due to issues with OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. and the blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor.

On 3 June 2024 the Openverse APIAPI An 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.’s home will be api.openverse.org and api.openverse.engineering will start redirecting to api.openverse.org. Existing API credentials and all other aspects of integrations with the Openverse API will continue to work without changes, provided requests follow redirects. Integrations that do not follow redirects will break on 3 June 2024. For the best experience, please update code referencing api.openverse.engineering to use api.openverse.org.

In order to prevent backwards compatibility issues for existing integrations (like the GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ media block), we will indefinitely maintain the redirect from api.openverse.engineering, though may choose to entirely deprecate the openverse.engineering domain at some far-future date.

This change unifies Openverse’s public-facing “brand” under the openverse.org domain and removes key areas of complexity in Openverse’s infrastructure, including areas related to site reliability.

The GitHub project thread for this change and its supporting documents explain these motivations in greater detail and outlines the work we’ve completed to make this possible. To comment on or share feedback regarding this change, leave a comment on this announcement post or the GitHub project thread, or leave a message in the #openverse channel of WordPress chat.

We will soon email all registered and verified Openverse API to notify them directly of this change.

#announcement

Introducing Collection views for Tags, Creators, and Sources

OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. now offers new ways to explore our collection of over 800 million images and audio files. The new Collection search views allow you to view works belonging to an individual tag, creator, or source.

On single search results, the creator and source names now link to the new views:

On this illustration result, clicking on “Alfred Chandler” or “Cleveland Museum of Art” now leads to a dedicated collection page. Here’s the page for the Cleveland Museum of Art, for example:

https://openverse.org/image/collection?source=clevelandmuseum

These new pages also exist for tags. All image or audio tags now link off to dedicated collection pages. In this example, clicking the “blubird” tag:

leads to a new collection of more bluebird images!

https://openverse.org/image/collection?tag=bluebird

If you notice and bugs or functionality you would like to see in these new views, please report an issue on the Openverse GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repository or reach out to our maintainers in the #openverse channel of the Make WP Chat. Thank you! Special thanks to @olgabulat and @fcoveram for implementing and designing the new functionality.

#announcement

Openverse Now Includes Over 1 Million Audio Records

OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. has reached a crucial milestone of including over 1,000,000 Creative Commons licensed audio files in our collection of GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples.-compatible media. When we launched audio earlier this year we included roughly ten thousand files.

The growth of the collection of the year is a testament to our contributors, partners, and audio sources. In particular, work to refactor our Provider DAGs, the scripts which collect Openverse media from 3rd party APIs, led by sponsored contributor @stacimc, helped us reach this exciting milestone. Thanks to Staci and all the Openverse contributors who made this possible!

Openverse indexes audio from Jamendo, Freesound, and Wikimedia Commons. Do you have another source of openly-licensed audio you’re excited about? Please send Openverse contributors your suggestions using our GitHub issue form.

#announcement

Openverse Frontend v3.1.1 Release

This week we released an update to the OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. frontend! This release included many improvements from our redesign launch in January. I’ll showcase a few of those here, and you can read the full release notes for more details. In total, there were over 64 bug fixes alongside some of these new features.

Content chooser on the mobile homepage

Prior to this release, mobile users weren’t able to select their desired content type on the homepage. They were only able to search ‘all results’.

Now they can choose their desired media type with large touch-friendly buttons.

Please don’t needlessly report cute puppies!

Redesigned content reporting flow

Our content reporting flow was redesigned to be simpler, more accessible, and easier for users.

New Image detail pages

Our image detail page was completely redesigned, and showcases images front and center.

Skip to content button

We now have a ‘Skip to Content’ button as the first focusable element on our pages for improved accessibilityAccessibility Accessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility).

Thanks to all of the Openverse team members who worked on and provided code review for these issues.

#announcement