What I learned technically: how strict resolution and licensing requirements really are for stock content,” or “how a moderation queue works for a large open source project.

What surprised me: how few photos some categories have — meaning even a small personal contribution has real impact,” or “how fast/slow the review process was.

What I’d do differently: shoot in RAW from the start to have more editing flexibility,” or “batch my submissions even smaller to catch mistakes earlier.

How this connects to the bigger picture: Contributing to the Photos team is a small piece of what makes WordPress work as an open source project — thousands of volunteers around the world, each doing a small, concrete task (translating, testing code, writing docs, or in my case, taking photos) that adds up to a platform millions of people use for free. It was a good first taste of what contributing to open source actually feels like, beyond just using the tools other people build.

Thanks for following along on this project — this is where my WPCredits Photos contribution wraps up