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The Road To 5000 Photos, A Retrospective

Back in December, when Matt announced the WP Photos project, I was tremendously excited. I had been thinking for about six months that something like this needed to exist, but I’m happy that it exists where it does now rather than somewhere else. I love looking at good photos, and having my beloved WordPress community uploading them sounded like heaven. I immediately applied to be a moderator, and after a month or two was accepted. Here we are eleven months later at over 5000 images uploaded. I didn’t moderate them all of course, we have an excellent team. But I did add it to my RSS feedRSS Feed RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication which is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. This is the feed., so I’ve seen all 5000, and let me tell you, there is some amazing material in there.

Marcus Burnette wrote a script to gather stats about the photos repo, let’s look at some about the last eleven months.

WP Photos Statistics

Stats:
5015 photos
57 Pending
620 rejected
634 since last meeting
78 rejected since last meeting
689 contributors

Our first set of numbers is about how many. Obviously, we know we’ve gone past 5000 photos, but there are some other interesting numbers here as well.

620 rejected photos out of 5015 isn’t bad, and in my experience it’s about 20% people uploading images they took from someplace else, and the rest are minor infractions of the rules. It’s surprising how often you don’t see a human face in a photo and just upload it. Sometimes it even makes it past a moderator. License plates have the same issue.

I’m particularly pleased by 689 contributors. The more we have, the less fragile the project is. It’s quite fun to be a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. and see delight on the faces of new contributors.

Camera Models

Top camera models

IPHONE 13 MINI 224

NIKON D7200 199

PIXEL 3 157

IPHONE 11 124

IPHONE XS MAX 123

IPHONE 5 105

IPHONE 13 PRO MAX 102

IPHONE 7 PLUS 102

PIXEL 4A 88

IPHONE 12 PRO MAX 86

When this project started I was deeply curious about whether we’d mostly get photos from phones or from cameras. Personally I use only my phone, but I know many people that have nice DSLRs uploading to the project. I’m in the 13 mini camp. I think it’s easy to see that phones are dominating this box. I’m guessing based on that stat that the majority of the photos in the project are spontaneous, and I love that. It’s far more a picture of our world as it exists now.

Camera Brands

Photos by camera brand

nikon 434

canon 526

sony 79

apple 1406

google 380

samsung 129

This isn’t a surprise, given the stat before it, but for camera aficionados it’s interesting. I’m not one of those, so I don’t know the significance of this breakdown. I’m particularly curious about the mainstream camera models. If you know if this is a good representation of general popularity please let me know in the comments.

Milestone Photos

Photo 1 – Scott Reilly
05/28/2021

Photo 100 – Marcus Kazmierczak
12/20/2021

Photo 500 – Michael Burridge
01/25/2022

Photo 1000 – Michael Burridge
02/04/2022

Photo 2000 – mdburnette
03/09/2022

Photo 3000 – mdburnette
06/14/2022

Photo 4000 – rafinkhan
09/06/2022

Photo 4100 – Pierre Lannoy
09/11/2022

Photo 4200 – Pierre Lannoy
09/13/2022

Photo 4300 – Topher
09/16/2022

Photo 4400 – ChrisEdwardsCE
09/20/2022

Photo 4500 – Irfan Nurhamid
10/04/2022

Photo 4600 – Jennifer Bourn
10/17/2022

Photo 4700 – Carlos Macías
10/21/2022

Photo 4800 – Dan Knauss
11/01/2022

Photo 4900 – chiharu nagatomi
11/09/2022

Photo 5000 – Roy Tanck
11/12/2022

Popular categories and colors

Most popular categories
nature (3200)
architecture (943)
objects (564)
animals (528)
food-drink (418)
arts-culture (334)
transportation (334)
patterns (186)
interiors (144)
technology (102)
fashion (39)
athletics (15)
Most popular colors
green (2347)
brown (2059)
blue (2002)
gray (1163)
white (1129)
orange (861)
yellow (750)
red (749)
black (738)
pink (351)
purple (141)
violet (75)
silver (35)

I put these two together because of how tightly together they’re tied. Any time I see a Nature photo, chances are at about 90% that it’s going to be tagged “Blue, Green, Brown“. Those are the colors of our world. Add in Gray for cloudy skies and it explains why Nature dominates the Most Popular Categories. Case in point:

Photo of a mountain under blue sky, tagged Blue, Brown, Green

World Photography Day

This was a global event that happened in August, and we did a push to get people to upload photos from their part of the world. All in all it went quite well, and we did a blog post about it, where you can see some of the photos that came from that specific event.

What it’s been like

It’s been a delight from the very beginning. Sure, there are 620 rejections, but I would venture a guess that none of them were deliberate attempts to get around the rules. I have about a dozen rejected photos I’ve uploaded myself.

We also haven’t a single “objectionable” photo yet. No one has been a jerk. At 5000 photos I find that to be impressive.

Our moderation team could use a few more people, but we’ve been able to keep up just fine. The reasons we don’t have more on the team are many, mostly legal. There are far more obstacles than I would ever have imagined, and some very smart people are working hard on it. We’ll get there at some point. Until then we rarely get above 50 unmoderated posts, and we’re often at zero (or five of the most recent moderator photos and they can’t moderate their own).

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the quality of the photos being submitted. The fact that a majority are from phones is a testament to the quality of modern phone cameras.

I’ll be curious to see if takes another eleven months to get to 10,000 photos. My guess is that we’ll get it about June. We’ll see.

If you haven’t taken part, please do so! It’s fun, easy, and a great way to get into WordPress contribution.

For those of you that already have uploaded, thank you very much.

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WordPress World Photography Day Challenge 2022

August 19 marks World Photography Day, a global event that brings together photography enthusiasts to commemorate the importance of this art form and expression in our lives.

To celebrate, the Photo Directory team has set up an open challenge for anyone to contribute to the WordPress Photo Directory

Submit a photo that captures something unique about your local area, in a way that helps represent the geographic diversity of the WordPress community.

The challenge starts today, August 18, 2022, and will end on August 28, 2022.

Photo challenge details

Take a photo of something you love in your local area (your neighborhood, town, city, or country). It can be a landscape, a street, a building, or something iconic of that region, for example. How you capture it is entirely up to you. Feel free to get creative and try a different shooting angle or composition.

Challenge requirements:

  • Make sure your images meet the WordPress Photo Directory guidelines for licensing, image file size and format, and content to be considered for approval and inclusion. 
  • You can submit up to five (5) photos at a time for approval. Once approved, you can upload more.

Here are some images contributed to the Photo Directory to inspire you:

How to submit your photos

For example: “Blaise Castle in Bristol, UK – WorldPhotographyDay22”. This will help search purposes and the Photos team to tag the images appropriately.

  • Once submitted, your photo will be reviewed by a volunteer team to ensure it complies with all the guidelines. It may take up to 48 hours for review, occasionally longer. You will receive an email as soon as your photos are reviewed.

If you have any questions when submitting your photos, please refer to the Make Photos Handbook. You are also welcome to join the #Photos channel on SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. at any time! Beyond this challenge, everyone is encouraged to get involved in the Photo Directory project!

You’ve submitted your photos, what’s next?

Contributions to this photo challenge will be featured across the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ social media channels. Stay tuned!

Once your photos are approved, we encourage you to leave a comment on this post with the wordpress.org/photos link of your photo and why you chose to take it (or a brief story behind it). 

Also, remember to post them on your social media platforms using the hashtags #WPPhotos and #WorldPhotographyDay so that more people can see and enjoy your contributions!

We look forward to seeing your photos!

Helpful resources

Thanks to @katiejrichards, @topher1kenobe, @mdburnette, @rmartinezduque, @laurlittle, @webcommsat, @oglekler, and @sereedmedia for sharing ideas and helping put this challenge together.

X-post: Contributor Teams: Submit WCUS 2022 Table Leads Signup Form by July 29

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Recap of team meeting, June 2

Slack Log (Requires SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. login to view. Set one up if you don’t have a Slack account.)

Welcome and links to documentation

Attendance: @katiejrichards, @topher1kenobe, @mdburnette, @kartiks16, @eboxnet, @meher, @krupalpanchal, @kafleg, @st810amaze

Welcome to the newcomers joining the Photos channel (Slack usernames): @roytanck@jillbinder@Melissa Ann Sorrells@krysal@Nav@Ryan Van de Kamp@gwallace@benlumia007@Nomad Skateboarding@Vagelis@Mira Padalia@Pratiksha@Ugyen@Jaed, @Krupal Panchal@Shuvo@chaion07@fuddin@david111780@tomeklach@Afshana Diya

Special thanks to all that joined us for this meeting, as it was held on a different day than usual to coincide with WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe’s Contributor DayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/. – where @topher1kenobe and @mdburnette were present!


Project milestones

This month, we have a few milestones to share since our last meeting on May 6th. It was another slower month, though some plans are in place to ramp up contribution. More on that in a minute.

But first, the numbers for this month.

As of this meeting, the directory includes over 2700 user-contributed photos, including passing numbers 2600 (Indian Banyan) and 2700 (beautiful pink flower)! Green, brown, and blue dominate the most popular colors, outpacing the next 7 most popular colors combined. This is likely because of the vast number of outdoor landscape photos contributed.

In addition, we’re nearing 300 individual contributors — clocking in at 293 as of this meeting! This continues to show us that, even with below-average submission counts, we’re still seeing a lot of new contributors. 🎉

Every month we’ll share some raw stats here as well. Here are a few stats for the month leading up to this meeting:

  • 300 photos were submitted in the last month
  • 61% have been approved
  • 32% are pending
  • 7% have been rejected for not meeting conditions to be published in the directory (insufficient photo quality or the inclusion of human faces being the most common reasons for rejection)

Current issues

➡️ Our largest issue at the moment continues to be our backlog of moderator applications. The current moderators and team reps have held additional discussions to clarify how moderators need to be vetted and the process by which this will happen.

We want to make sure folks are onboarded with all the tools and information they’ll need to hit the ground running. If you submitted an application to become a Photo Directory moderator, you should have heard from us and we’ll begin onboarding new moderators soon!

➡️ Also, we’ve discussed partnering with meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. organizers for Photo Directory promotion. A LearnWP workshop video and lesson plan exist for these meetups and we’re in talks with several organizers now. If you’re interested in sharing about the WordPress Photo Directory and would like to talk to us about it, please let us know in the #photos Slack channel!

➡️ Finally, a quick chat was had about ALT text for images at submission. No clear plan of action was decided based on this discussion, though all parties agree that this is an important and necessary addition.


Open discussion

Due to the participation in WCEU Contributor Day, open discussion was light this time around. The only issue surfaced this time was surrounding better discovery of one’s own submitted photos — like a “My Profile” or “My Photos” link. All authors currently have pages with their photos, but these are not easily accessed for finding your own contributions.

Two tickets were created by @topher1kenobe based on this conversation:


Next Meeting

You are welcome to join the team at any time! If you are new to the Photos team, please introduce yourself in the #photos channel before the meeting (or anytime!) and feel free to join us in the meeting and participate as you are able.


Photos Team Mission

The Photos team helps people use and contribute to the WordPress Photo Directory through creative commons licensed (CC0) photography that can be used without cost or attribution, for any purpose, via wordpress.org/photos.

Getting Involved

Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join in, comment on posts, and participate in meetings and on projects.

  1. WordPress.org/photos
  2. WordPress Photo Directory team handbook
  3. Our Team Blog

#weekly-chat