EDITS.WS

Tag: Openverse

  • Openverse Wins 2023 Open Education Award, Seeks Community Feedback for 2024 Roadmap

    Openverse has landed an Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Infrastructure category. Open Education Global (OEG) is a non-profit organization that supports the use of open education to expand education access and affordability. Its annual awards recognize outstanding contributions to the Open Education community and its network of resources.

    Openverse is one of 16 winners selected from more than 170 applicants. The award reviewers suggested Openverse “should be the primary recommended search for OER development,” due to its clear licensing and easy, one-click attribution, among other features:

    That easy attribution feature (one-click copy for a full formed Creative Commons attribution) might be reason enough for an award, but the features to filter searches by source collections and other parameters (image orientation, specific license) provides seekers of open content important affordances to find clearly licensed media they can reuse.

    Openverse should be the primary recommended search for OER development, as the licensing is explicitly clear, not subject to third party owners writing their own license), being of great value for projects that mix content from multiple sources. 

    Openverse has made significant progress since coming under the WordPress project’s umbrella. In the past year, the team has added usage analytics, made major improvements to its user interface, moved Openverse out of an iFrame, added filtering and blurring of sensitive results (nearing completion), among many other technical improvements. The team is requesting feedback as they begin planning the 2024 roadmap.

    “This project thrives on collaboration, and as we begin plotting our course for 2024, we want to hear from you,” Automattic-sponsored Openverse data engineer Madison Swain-Bowden said. “Have an idea that could improve Openverse? Noticed a feature gap we haven’t addressed? Have suggestions to improve existing features? We are eager to hear all about it!”

    Anyone who wants to contribute a proposal regarding Openverse’s future can publish a comment to the team’s blog post requesting feedback. For more information about Openverse’s current projects and those that are on hold, check out the notes from the team’s most recent monthly meeting.

  • Mojeek Search Engine Adds WordPress’ Openverse to Image Search

    Mojeek, a UK-based privacy-oriented search engine, has added Openverse to its image search. For more than 15 years, Mojeek has provided independent, unbiased search without tracking or building profiles on users. It is one of just a handful of genuine search engines that uses its own technology and algorithms, unlike the metasearch engines that syndicate Bing, Google, and Yandex. In October 2022, Mojeek passed a major milestone of having indexed more than 6 billion pages.

    The search engine had previously provided Pixabay as the default for its image search with the option to use Bing as an alternative.

    “We have always wanted to eventually get rid of Bing,” Mojeek Head of Marketing Joshua Long said. “Due to both Microsoft’s API pricing decisions, and informed comments by people using Mojeek to search the web, we recently took that step.”

    Openverse’s openly-licensed media was a natural fit for the independent search engine. In 2021, Creative Commons Search was rebranded to Openverse when it came under the umbrella of the WordPress open source project. With more than 700 million Creative Commons licensed and public domain image and audio files, Openverse exceeds Pixabay’s 4 million+ royalty-free and stock images, greatly expanding users’ abilities to search deeper on more topics.

    Although Pixabay is still Mojeek’s default image search provider, users can change their preferences, which are set using a local cookie and contain no personal data.

    “This addition is a testament to the utility that Openverse brings, as well as the ease and extensibility when it comes to using its API,” Long said.

  • WordPress 6.2 Openverse Integration Updated to Upload Inserted Images

    WordPress 6.2’s Openverse integration is getting some last minute changes after contributors expressed concerns about it hotlinking images by default. The new feature allows users to quickly insert free, openly-licensed media into their content. It also allows users to upload external images through a button in the block toolbar, but this creates an extra step in the process and is easy to miss in the UI.

    Several contributors cited GDPR and privacy concerns in the ticket that called for uploading the images by default. They also noted that hotlinked images can pose problems for users who want further manipulate the images by cropping, rotating, and filtering, and for developers managing site migrations. Some went as far as to say the feature belongs in a canonical plugin, which would likely have had a less rushed implementation and better testing prior to landing in core.

    “I am deeply uncomfortable with any integration of Openverse into core,” WordPress contributor Peter Shaw said. “Philosophically WordPress is a personal publishing platform so it should be avoiding external APIs and dependencies. The only external calls it should make (by default) is to check for updates.

    “No issue with the service itself though (I like it) but it should be a canonical plugin that site owners consciously install. Either way images must be on the local server though.”

    As the hotlinking drew more attention, WordPress contributors chimed in on the ticket to call for the feature not to be shipped in its current implementation.

    “This cannot ship this way, or it will get unknowing users sued,” Yoast founder Joost de Valk said. “Next to that it has negative performance implications, as you can’t do srcset or loading attributes on images loaded from remote. Sideload really should be the default, and in fact IMHO, only way.”

    Gutenberg contributor Nik Tsekouras jumped in with a quick PR that changes the implementation to upload the Openverse images when they are inserted, wherever possible.

    “We definitely want to upload to the site library for this flow and should treat this as a bug,” Gutenberg Lead Architect Matias Ventura said. “There’s work going on in parallel to upload by default on other actions (like pasting) that are not as straightforward or general enough (hence the need for something like #46014) but this one should be straightforward.”

    Tsekouras’ PR ensures that any images inserted from Openverse are uploaded. If they cannot be uploaded to media library due to CORS issues, WordPress inserts the Image block with the external URL and a warning about legal compliance and privacy issues. Here’s an example of a successful upload:

    video credit: James Koster in PR #48501

    WordPress 6.2 Beta 4 was delayed this morning until March 1, due to an unrelated regression introduced in 6.2. Tsekouras cherry-picked the Openverse PR to the wp/6.2 branch to get it included in the next release, so the next beta should ship with the updated implementation.