 Welcome to the WP Photos Moderation Walkthrough on TOEFLER. This video is going to show you how to go through the moderation process of photos. I'm going to point out some things that you should do, should not do, and many things that are optional. We're going to start here at WordPress.org. We go to Community, Photo Directory, and in the top right, we're going to log in. This is your normal WordPress.org username and password. Then, once you're logged in, in the top left, you should see a link to a dashboard for the WordPress Photo Directory. Here we are. Now, on the left, you'll see the Photos menu item. The red 129 means there are 129 photos to be moderated, and you don't want the Photos option, you want the Q. Right here, I'm going to pause and point something out. I'm using the Brave browser, and you could also use Chrome, and if you do, there is this extension in the Chrome Web Store, made by Marcus, that makes the process a lot easier, and I really recommend you get it. You can use either Chrome or Brave. Let me point out some of the things that it does for you. Normally, the oldest photo is at the top of the list, but with this extension, it takes all the first-time contributor photos and puts them at the top so that their photos get moderated a little earlier and they feel a little more taken care of as they're coming in the door. If you did not have this extension, it would look like this. So you can see the last modified here is the 19th of May, whereas this one's the 26th. So let's take a look at what you're going to see on this page. What's really important is things like these flags. Now, all these blue ones are first-time contributors, so they're all going to say no published photo. This one says there's a face detected. Now Google decides that they're AI and it could be completely wrong. So don't just assume that you can reject it because you see this flag. You will also see some that are blurred out and this one says racy and spoof. It'll blur it whether it thinks it's racy or spoof. And again, it's Google's AI deciding this. And I'd like to point out that I have never ever in this process, in this system, seen a racy or spoof image. It's almost always something perfectly normal that Google didn't understand. Now that said, you are under no obligation to click on a blurry picture and see what's in there. If you just want to skip it and not mess with it, that's totally fine. Let's go down some more. There's another racy spoof, another face detected. Let's get down out of the, here we go. You'll occasionally see has rejections. This is not a good one because there's some broken images. Although we should talk about that. Sometimes you'll get some submissions without images. Just leave them, somebody will take care of them. All right, so here's a face detected, has rejections. Rejections are totally fine. Anybody who does this any amount of time will get many. For example, here's Josh Pollock. He has 24 rejections. On the other hand, he has 203 approved. He's a known trusted user. So the fact that he has rejections doesn't put me off at all. So let's click to edit one. We'll start at the top here. Birds at mustard land. You're gonna see a number of photos that the descriptions are written by people who English is not their first language. And so we'll talk about how to deal with that. So we click edit right here. And I wanna talk about a few things that again, the Chrome extension does that the other does not. For example, there's a button here to convert to sentence case. In this case, I bet it's just gonna put a period at the end. Nope, it didn't even do that. But it can fix weird cases, sensitivity, et cetera. I actually never use it, but you're welcome to. Check TNI. TNI is a service that checks to see where this photo might be out on the internet. So let's click it. And it's searching the entire internet and he did not find another copy of this anywhere. I use this button a lot with new people because they often don't realize that they're not allowed to steal a cool image from some other site and submit it. People who've been around a while usually don't do that. This one. So you see the TNI button is not here. Another big difference is the color tags are colored with the Chrome extension. Over here, they're not. And then, oh, latest photos by this author. This is a first time submitter, so there's nothing here. But if this person had submitted others, you would see all their old pictures here and you could see general quality of work, what they've done in the past, that sort of thing. Without that extension, you don't get that option here. So let's start at the top and talk about what we're doing here. This text here is the alt text for the image. And so you need to describe this image to someone who is blind. What do we see here? We see birds standing on fence posts in a field with, it looks like a storm in the background, very stormy sky. The original describer said mustard land. I'm gonna guess this is a mustard field. So we can use the text they send in addition to what we're gonna write. So let's put in birds sitting on fence posts along the edge of a mustard field. Deeply stormy sky in the background, there. So then we have to pick categories. You don't wanna pick more than, probably not more than two ever, I never do. Animals in nature usually go together and then we pick colors. So gray is a dominant color, black is the bird, green is the field. So we're gonna leave it at that even though there's a tiny bit of orange, we don't care. Tags, oh, something else I wanna point out. The categories, colors and tags, when you first come here, we're all just made up by Google. So they could be completely wrong and then there's no one out there that's gonna feel bad if you disagree, just the Google bot. So feel free to just throw them all away. Often I delete every tag that is suggested and just start over. So I'm not gonna put in beak because that's really minor. But we leave bird, sky is a tough one because there's a sky in almost every picture. We try to only leave sky if it has a significant part of the photo, a significant meaning. In this case, the sky is a lot of the photo and it's dark, I mean, that's a feature. So I'm gonna also put in fence, fence. Post, field, and that's probably it. Anytime a location is mentioned by the submitter, I include it so that you can know if it's from a particular state in India or a particular city in Austria or something like that. So then we come down here and you could save a spending, I never do, but if you were half done and you just wanted to put it back and not do anything to it, you could. This is the rejection spot and these are the possible reasons you could reject. They basically reflect the rules that the person had to agree with when they submitted it. Some people just don't pay attention. I've had, I mean, you're not allowed to have human faces. I've had people upload a selfie of just their face. They just weren't paying attention. Another very common one is privacy. Where's that? I'm sure you can see it already right here. Essentially violates privacy. This one happens by accident a lot because if you get a picture of a city street and there is a license plate, it fails just like that. If you take a picture of a neighborhood and there are street signs and house numbers, that's no good because then you know exactly where that was. So these happen a lot by accident. The other one that happens a lot is insufficient image quality. People just don't realize how blur they are or maybe the horizon is tip sideways or whatever. Once you choose these, one of these, the publish button goes away and the reject button turns red and that's all you can click. If you reject, it's polite to put in a reason. Occasionally you may need to put in a moderator's only note and save as pending. I don't think I've ever done it. So then I'm gonna click publish. Now without the extension, if you click publish it's simply going to go back to the queue. With the Chrome extension, it goes to a next photo. And we jumped ahead to Josh. We talked about Josh earlier. So let's talk about his because he does a really good job usually. Let's see what our picture is. Got some pink flowers, there's a little bit of brick. Pink flowers with dangly little buds that haven't totally become flowers yet at all. That works. Somebody's blind doesn't care about the color, they don't know that. But I would be content with that. Don't need to convert to sentence case. I'm not gonna check TNI because I know Josh and he's not gonna do that. Category is nature. Colors, green and pink. And I'm gonna put in brown. There's a lot of brick there. And then tags. We're gonna skip branch. We don't put colors in here because it's a redundant or redundant taxonomy. Similarly, I wouldn't put nature in as a tag because we have nature already. So these are actually hydrangeas. And you can see we've had other hydrangeas. And I'll put in bud and I'll put in brick and then we'll publish. Now these are going at random and I don't necessarily wanna do that. I want to go back to the top and start with new people again. I'm gonna take a risk and click on a greasy one and show you what happens. Says toothless dog. Okay, so this one's gonna fail because it is extraordinarily blurry. Oh, it's something else I wanna show you. You can click on this and get it full size. And that helps you see it's just really blurry. So that just, we skip all the other stuff. We go right to reject and we say insufficient image quality and this is their first image. So it may discourage them from trying again. So you want to help them feel like it's not their fault. They can come back with a different one. Please keep trying. We appreciate you, et cetera. So I'm gonna say this was quite blurry but that's a great dog. Could you try again with a clearer one? That encourages them to come back and keep trying. Then we hit reject. And when you reject, it goes back to the queue. So this one actually looks too blurry also, but we'll see. Okay, so this is a tough one because close up here, it's quite blurry. But if you click through, you'll note, these are kind of clear. And so it's forced perspective. So I'm not sure about this one. This is one where you could take this URL and post it in the moderator Slack channel and get other people's opinions. Or you could write a note down here and save as pending. Or you can just say, I'm gonna leave it. Somebody else will get it. There's 126 photos. You can do 125 of them and somebody will be happy to take care of that other one. This one's interesting to me because it says face detected and I see shoulders but I don't see a face. Okay, so there's obviously no face. People are allowed as long as you can't see faces. So this is actually pretty great. We don't have that many people photos because faces aren't allowed. So I particularly appreciate this one. However, the description is simply nature, not very helpful. So what is this? This is a woman standing by a wall looking over a vast expanse with mountains in the foreground and a stormy sky. So let's write that. There we go. Now up here in the top right, you can see who the contributor is and this link opens a new tab. Oh, it doesn't, it was supposed to. Do I get to keep my description? No. All right, let's try that again. Woman opening in a new tab. You can go see that this was taken by Devanshi Joshi who works at RT Camp. And you could contact her there. Additionally, you can open this other link which is the profile page. And here's the username. And if they're on Slack, it will tell you their Slack name and you can find them there. Usually you don't contact the photographer unless it's really important. I do it occasionally for personal reasons, but I'm not gonna ask her about this woman or anything. So then nature does work as a category, but then there's also people. There's a people here, we can do that. And we have a great sky. We have a red and yellow shirt. We have black hair. I'm gonna go with green because of the mountain. We'll leave it at that. Cloud is another tricky one because many photos have clouds and they're just not that important. In this case, they're kind of a substantial part of the picture. So I'm gonna leave it. Mountain, sky, again, we're gonna leave it tartan. Nope, that's not a Scottish tartan. Travel, this doesn't have anything to do with travel. So now I'm gonna put in view, vista, put in hair. So that's a pretty great hair there. Hand, because there are hands on the wall there. And we'll leave it at that and publish. That's basically it. You make sure there's good descriptive text. You make sure the image is of good quality and not stolen. You give it categories, colors and tags and either reject or publish. And right now we have an extraordinarily high number. 125 is really high. Usually it doesn't get up about 10 or 15 before somebody jumps in and clears them out. You are under no obligation to do any particular number. You could do one a day if you wanted. You could do 10 a day. You could spend your whole weekend and clear them out every weekend. Doesn't matter. You are under no obligation to moderate any particular photo. You don't have to start at the top and go through and do every one. There's one you don't wanna do. Don't do it, skip it. Communication is useful. We like to chit chat in the moderator room. We point out pictures that could be problematic. Maybe they're not. We don't know. We have a discussion. Somebody else may come through and moderate a photo that you are working on and unsure about. That's fine. That's just the way it goes. So I wanna encourage you that your help is valued but not required. If you don't wanna do this, don't do it. And if you do, have a good time. So thank you. Thank you for what you do. I appreciate it.