This is the fifth weekly installment where I summarize my interactions with the WordPress Photo Directory throughout the week while attempting to fulfill my 366 photos in 2024 challenge.
I can’t believe that it’s already the first full week of February!
The one remaining pending photo in my last post was approved!
That puts my running totals to start the week at:
- Submitted: 41
- Approved: 35
- Pending: 0
- Rejected: 6
- Resubmitted: 0
My overall acceptance rate to start the week remained at 85%.
Here’s my update from week 5!
Photos used
This week was a busy week and I did not get a chance to blog at all. My lone used image is the featured image for this post.
Featured image credit: CC0 licensed photo by Makarand G. Mane from the WordPress Photo Directory.
Photos submitted
This week I made it a point to submit more photos than usual because of the global WordPress Photo Festival happening from February 3rd-February 10th. The event was organized by the Kerala, India WordPress Community as a way to encourage some submissions to the directory.
Anyone can participate by including the #WPKeralaPhotos tag in the description field of their submissions to the photo directory. At the time of publish, there were over 1,500 photos accepted through the event.
In total, I submitted 14 photos:
- Accepted: 13
- Pending: 0
- Rejected: 1
Here are all of the photos I submitted this week along with a little context for each!
Photo #42 (approved)
This photo was taken on an April morning in 2018 while walking my dog outside my apartment at the time.
Photo #43 (approved)
In 2017, my wife and I went on a cruise to Alaska that sailed out of Seattle. We had a few days on either side of the cruise to do some sightseeing. We walked by the Seattle Space Needle quite a few times. The sky was so clear and such a deep blue this day.
Photo #44: (approved)
While attending WordCamp Europe in 2023, I had a day to do some sightseeing with coworkers before the event. Our first stop was checking out the Parthenon and other monuments on the Athenian Acropolis. The monument is visible from almost everywhere in Athens.
A fun fact: the Acroplis, Athens is number 404 on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Given that, I’m surprised that I was able to find it at all.
Photo #45 (approved)
Because of the close proximity to Providence, Rhode Island, the WordPress RI Meetup was held a few times in Fall River, Massachusetts at the emagine office. Outside of the office is Bicentenial Park, which has a park, boardwalk, and monument area along the Taunton River. The park also has an 80% scale replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall found in Washington DC, monuments for the Korean War, the War on Terror, and Gold Star Families.
The photo below is a replica of the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery found in the park. I was bummed to find out that the monument was vandalized just this week while looking for some pages to link to about the monuments in the park.
Photo #46 (approved)
Another site that we checked out while in Seattle in 2017 was the famous Gum Wall under Pike Place Market. It was honestly pretty gross thinking back to it. But one of the touristy things we chose to check out.
Photo #47 (approved)
I’m realizing now that I must have scrolled to my Seattle trip in my camera roll when selecting a lot of this week’s photos because this was also from that trip. We visited the Pacific Science Center while in the city. One of the exhibits was the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor of China. Some of the photos from the excavation site are unbelievable.
I tried to find out if the exhibit found a permanent home, but my search came up empty. It looks like it went to Philadelphia after Seattle, and some of it may have ended up at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
Photo #48 (rejected)
This was another statue from the same exhibit as above. This one was rejected for quality issues. I spoke to someone who’s a moderator. They shared that one thing to do before submitting a photo is to look at it scaled 100%. If you do that with this image, you’ll notice it’s quite grainy.
I can’t disagree with that on this photo. Even though the figure had a light on it, the room was generally darker, and this was several iPhones ago so the camera was much less capable.
Photo #49 (approved)
This was a wine rack in the gift shop at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. The Biltmore is the largest privately owned house in the United States.
Photo #50 (approved)
This is a photo of the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska. While in port, we went took a bus over to the visitors center directly across the lake from the glacier. I believe that we did this and a whale watch where we saw quite a few Orcas. It was great, but we were a little bummed because the original plan was to go dog sledding. It was too foggy for the helicopters to fly out over the glacier and it was cancelled.
Photo #51 (approved)
In Newport, Rhode Island there are several mansions from the Gilded Age that are preserved by the Preservation Society of Newport County. At Christmas, they decorate the interiors for anyone taking a tour to enjoy. This was inside of The Breakers, which is the largest of those mansions.
Photo #52 (approved)
Here’s another photo from our Seattle trip in 2017. Pike Place Market was one of my favorite places we visited.
Photo #53 (approved)
On a trip to Portland, Maine in 2018, we stopped by the Portland Head Light in Fort Williams Park, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Built in 1791, the lighthouse is Maine’s oldest. The keeper’s house was converted into a museum that we also checked out. It wasn’t very nice out, but the dark rocks contrasted with the sky and this was my best photo from our visit that day.
Thoughts & Observations
Here are some of the thoughts & observations I had throughout the week while interacting with the Photo Directory.
This week, I only have one that ended up sending me down quite the rabbit hole today.
Photos Losing Color in the Photo Directory
I was downloading a copy of my Seattle Space Needle photo from the directory to include in this post when I noticed something strange. The full size download had -rotated added to the image name. This seemed odd because the photo has always been properly oriented for me from my phone to my laptop to uploading.
At first, I wondered if a moderator had rotated it slightly to straighten the framing. So I removed the -rotated from the URL to see if another image would load. Violà! The original copy that I had uploaded showed. But when it changed, I noticed that the sky became a different shade of blue. I went back and forth a few times, and the image WordPress had generated was absolutely different.
It’s really hard to see here, but if you open both images in separate tabs and go back and forth, you can clearly tell there’s a change. After looking closer at the metadata for each photo, I noticed that w.org generated images had a comment field added which specified a value of CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 82.
GD is one of two image editors supported by WordPress out of the box (the other being ImageMagick). However, it’s not the default when ImageMagick is available despite being more performant for a few reasons:
- GD supports fewer file formats.
- GD has some very strange quirks around color profiles.
- GD is known to create images of lesser quality.
In this case, my original image was taken on my iPhone, which was using a Display P3 color profile. I’m unsure whether GD supports this color profile or not, but it’s definitely defaulting to an sRGB profile, which has 25% fewer colors available.
It’s really complicated to explain the how and why (and I don’t even fully understand it yet). But to visualize the difference, I recommend checking this site out (just not in Firefox). The first two images on the page will toggle back and forth on click between DCI-P3 and sRGB versions of the images. If your screen supports it, you’ll notice a difference in how deep the colors are.
In my testing, when ImageMagick is the image editor used, the original Display P3 color profile is preserved, even when image sub-sizes are generated confirming why it makes a better default choice when available. After all this investigation, I wrote all this up in a Meta ticket requesting w.org switch to using ImageMagick.
A stretch goal that I also mentioned was reprocessing and regenerating all of the image sub-sizes created for photos in the directory in order to bring back any color that may have been lost in a battle with GD. But I recognize that could end up being really hard with CDN caching, and the fact that the images are pushed to the Openverse already (I’m not sure if Openverse downloads its own copy of the image, or if it always uses whatever w.org has).
Hat tip to my friends Joe and Pascal for giving me a push in the right direction in the #core-media channel in Slack. I’m still not sure the reason for -rotated being added to the image. But the end result was correct, so I haven’t dug in deeper yet.
Favorite Photos
Here are some of my favorite photos I discovered in the directory this week. All of these photos were submitted as part of the WordPress Photo Festival! You can browse all festival photos using the tag archive pages on the photo directory.
Summary
With the above included, this closes out the week with my running totals at:
- Submitted: 54
- Approved: 48
- Pending: 0
- Rejected: 7
Previous posts in this series: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4.