Viptor Says: New WordPress Make Team for the Photo Directory

Hello, everybody! Viptor here! Today, I would like to bring your attention to the WordPress Photo Directory, which, in less than two months, has grown to almost 1,400 authorized free photographs. I was pleased to learn that the directory now has an eager team of contributors ready to drive the project ahead. This great news comes after a successful appeal for testers and volunteer photo moderators.

I and everyone at our WordPress Agency for Development are not surprised that Angela Jin’s pitch for photo moderators struck a chord with many people since it specified a manageable time commitment (1-2 hours per week) and didn’t require any particular skills other than an enthusiasm for photography.

Photo Directory Moderators are now spending 1-2 hours per week learning about the Photo Directory and current moderation tools. Apart from that, they are also actively discussing future best practices.

Our WordPress development agency has discovered that Angela Jin’s call was answered by about two dozen individuals. We believe that this was a really smart strategy because instead of relying on a smaller staff that would be required to dedicate more hours to the job at hand, we now have a large base of dedicated contributors.

The New WordPress Make Team

This month Jin announced the Photo Directory as a new WordPress Make team, formalizing the new contributor community. The team will begin posting at make.wordpress.org/photos after collaborating in the new #photos channel in WordPress Slack.

Our WordPress agency for enterprise found out that the new team will be working on two handbooks, one public and the other private, that will detail how moderators should handle various things like curation and inappropriate content.

The Openverse Project and the WordPress Photo Directory: What’s the Difference?

I have come to realize that the distinction between the WordPress Photo Directory and the Openverse project has caused considerable misunderstanding among WordPress users and enthusiasts. So, let’s make things clear to avoid further confusion.

The experts from our WordPress development company want to remind you that the Openverse project indexes 600 million Creative Commons licensed and public domain pictures and music assets.

Openverse operates by pulling from a variety of sources. This is where the WordPress Photo Directory comes into play. In a nutshell, the WordPress Photo Directory is a new source that will be included with all photos licensed under the CC0 license.

Openverse contributor Zack Krida, who is supported by Automattic, described the distinction between the WordPress Photo Directory and Openverse in a simple way. He explained that the WordPress Photo Directory is a new curated source of free, high-quality images, as well as a new Openverse submission method driven by the WordPress community.

Our WordPress Agency for Development is a huge fan of the WordPress Photo Directory, as, without it, you’d have to submit your work to Openverse through Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, or other sources.

How to Contribute to the Photo Directory?

Now that you know the difference between the WordPress Photo Directory and the Openverse project, you’d probably want to know how you can contribute to the Directory. One way to do that is by directly submitting photos.

Once you’ve chosen the photograph you wish to submit, the procedure is pretty straightforward and takes less than a minute. After you submit, pending images are presented in a table, and each account’s moderation queue is restricted to five at this moment.

Our WordPress development agency warns you that there is an agreement right now that states: “Photos must not contain any human faces”. The rules specify that entries cannot contain human faces at this time for legal reasons. We hope that this constraint will be addressed before the directory’s release. After all, the Directory doesn’t stand a chance of being a world-class free picture resource without providing images with faces on them.

Sarah Gooding has submitted a meta trac ticket that requests a feature that can be very handy. It’s about having a simple option to copy attribution information and acknowledge the photographer with a link back to the individual photo listing.

Indeed, attribution is not necessary for CC0 photographs, but our WordPress agency for enterprise is with Gooding on that one, as this feature can be helpful. This would also aid the popularization of the photo directory, with backlinks flowing in from all over the Internet.

Become a Part of the New WordPress Make Team for the Photo Directory!

And so, I am happy to report that the Photo Directory is gaining a lot of traction right now. I believe this is a great way to give back to the WordPress community without needing to know how to code.

Our WordPress development agency reminds you that meetings for the project are yet to begin, but participants may join the new Slack channel and subscribe to the Make network’s new Photo Directory blog whenever it debuts.

That was it for this week’s news, folks. See you again very soon and until then, make sure you stop by Vipe Studio’s blog regularly to read all our WordPress-related articles.

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