WordPress Photos Project Work, January 2026
I’ve been volunteering on the WordPress Photos project since its inception nearly 5 years ago. Since then I’ve moderated over 4,000 photos, and up to the 30,000 mark personally reviewed every approved submission. It’s been an absolute delight to see the world through the lenses of the WordPress community.
Starting this month, Kinsta has sponsored some of my time to work on this project, so I’m starting a journal of sorts about what I work on.
Moderation
This is the bulk of the work, hundreds of photos go through the moderation queue per day. I moderated several dozen photos in January. Other moderators moderate more than I because I also work on some things that general moderators cannot.
If you want to see some of my favorites you can go to my favorites page, and if you want to read some behind-the-scenes stuff, check out WPPhotos.Info. The featured image for this post is one that I took the other day. It’s a field of baby Christmas trees covered in snow.
Flagged Images
Every photo submitted to the project gets run through Google Vision, which applies some tags, some categories, and watches for potentially objectionable material. In many countries there are laws about allowing moderators to see certain kinds of objectionable photos, so this provides a level of protection for the moderators. When it flags a photo it gets listed in a separate queue from the rest of them, and only a small handful of people are able to moderate them. I’m one of those people, so I watch that queue.
In January I moderated 5 or 6 flagged photos. There are never very many to be done, and as far as I know there’ve only been 5 or 6 photos ever submitted that that actually broke the rules of the project. The vast majority of flagged photos are simply dogs, or apes, or fruit or something.
Here are some recent examples of photos that Google thought could be “problematic”:
Tag Management
Moderators may create new tags, but cannot delete tags. As I mentioned above, Google also suggests tags, so it’s not uncommon for a moderator to approve a photo with some… unusual tags. By policy we try to keep tags singular, so for example we want “seed” instead of “seeds”. That said we have many plural tags, misspelled tags, tags with no photos in them, and a variety of other issues.
A couple months ago I spearheaded an effort to start cleaning those up. Scott Reilly did some magic and made it so he could provide tag management access to several of us, and we’ve been working on making the tag pool more useful by cleaning up those kinds of issues.
In January I removed about 30 tags that had no photos in them at all. When a tag is deleted it intelligently tries to make a 301 redirect to a logical replacement.
I also did some searches for city names. The search covers the alt text. Then I looked for photos that had a city name in the alt text, but did NOT have a tag for it, and added the tag to each of them. I also did several countries. Now that I know that this works I’ll be doing similar things for other words. For example, just now I searched for the word “popcorn” and found 7 photos with that word in the alt text, and 4 of them didn’t have the tag. This is a simple example, there are others than have dozens of results.
When we first started cleaning up tags we cleared out all the color tags, because color is its own taxonomy. They continue to get in there though, as people miss them in the suggested tags. In February I’ll clear those out again.
Other common cleanup things are doing things like changing the tag “Autumn leaves” to two tags, “autumn” and “leaf”. There are many similar issues.
Summary
For all that I’ve worked on the project for a long time, this is the first time I’ve written down what I actually do, which is kind of fun.
Many thanks to Kinsta for the support, every bit helps!
