There is a corner of WordPress.org that almost nobody talks about, and it is full of some of the best work the community produces.
The WordPress Photo Directory holds over 43,000 photographs. Every one is CC0, which means you can use any of them for anything, commercial work included, without asking or crediting anyone. They were shot by WordPress folks: developers, designers, translators, organisers, people who went out with a camera on a weekend and gave the results away.
WPFolks now has a Photos section that shows the work of the folks who are here. This guide covers what it is, how to get your photos into it, and what you can do with everything already there.
What the Photos section actually is
It is not a copy of the WordPress Photo Directory. It is a view of it, narrowed to one thing: photos shot by folks who have a WPFolks profile.
That distinction is the whole point. On wordpress.org a photo credits a username. Here it credits a person you can click through to: their plugins, their themes, their talks, their badges, the rest of what they have built. The photograph stops being an anonymous asset and becomes part of somebody’s body of work.
If you have ever downloaded a photo from the WordPress Photo Directory, there is a reasonable chance the person who took it also maintains a plugin you use. You had no way of knowing that. Now you do.
Using the photos
Nothing is gated. You do not need an account, and you do not need to ask.
Browse by category, colour or orientation, or search the captions. Sunset, laptop, coffee, whatever you need.
Download in three sizes directly from the photo page:
| Size | Roughly |
|---|---|
| Large | 1024px on the long edge |
| Medium | 768px |
| Small | 300px |
Those cover almost every web use. The full original, which is often 7000px wide and several megabytes, is one click away on WordPress.org. We link there rather than serving it ourselves, because the file already lives there and there is no sense in moving it twice.
The licence is CC0. No rights reserved. Use them in client work, in a theme demo, in a book, on a billboard. No attribution required, no permission needed, no payment.
Crediting the photographer is still a kind thing to do. It costs you a line and it means something to the person who gave the photo away. Their profile is right there.
Getting your photos in
Two steps, and the first one happens on WordPress.org rather than here.
Step 1: submit to the WordPress Photo Directory
Go to wordpress.org/photos and submit. You will need a WordPress.org account, which you almost certainly already have.
The guidelines are stricter than people expect, and it is worth reading them properly before you upload. The ones that catch most folks out:
- JPEG, between 2000×2000 and 7500×7500 pixels, 1 to 20 MB. Phone photos usually qualify. Heavily cropped ones sometimes do not.
- No faces. For legal reasons, submissions cannot contain the faces of people. This is the single most common surprise.
- No overlays. No watermarks, no copyright notices, no borders, no text.
- Minimally processed. Colour and contrast corrections are fine. Dramatic filters are not.
- No near-duplicates. A different angle or a different crop of a photo you already submitted counts as a variation and will be declined. Pick your best frame and submit that one.
- No prominent branding, no collages, no photographs of other people’s artwork.
You can have five photos in the moderation queue at a time. Once those are approved you can submit more.
Every submission is reviewed by volunteer moderators, so allow 24 to 36 hours. You get an email either way, and a declined photo comes with the reason.
Step 2: connect your WordPress.org username on WPFolks
This is what tells us a photo is yours.
Add your WordPress.org username to your WPFolks profile. If you have already connected it, and most folks have because it powers plugin and theme attribution too, you are done. There is nothing photo-specific to switch on.
That is the entire join. Your handle on wp.org, matched to your handle here.
When your photos show up
WPFolks checks in with WordPress.org on a schedule rather than the moment you upload, so there is a lag.
Once a photo is approved on wp.org, it appears here within a day or two. Your whole back catalogue comes across the first time, not just recent uploads, so a photographer with two hundred photos gets two hundred.
They land in two places:
- The Photos directory, alongside everyone else’s
- Your profile, in a grid on your own page
You do not have to do anything to keep them in sync. New approvals arrive on their own.
If you connect your WordPress.org username for the first time today, your photos will not appear instantly. Give it a couple of days before assuming something is wrong.
Why this exists
The honest answer is that the Photo Directory is underused, and the people filling it deserve better than a username.
WordPress runs on a lot of unglamorous contribution. Photography sits at the far end of that: it does not ship in core, nobody files a bug against it, and it earns no props in a release. Somebody still went out, took the picture, processed it, submitted it, waited for moderation, and released it into the public domain for anyone to use.
Connecting that work to the rest of what a person contributes seemed worth doing. It also, quietly, means the next person hunting for a free photo for a client site is browsing work by folks they might already know.
Practical notes
You keep the copyright. CC0 waives your rights to enforce it; it does not transfer ownership. Nobody can claim they took your photo.
We do not host your images. They are served from WordPress.org’s own servers. We store the listing: the caption, the categories, the link, and who took it.
Removing a photo from wp.org removes it here. WordPress.org stays the source of truth. Delete there and it stops appearing here on the next sync.
Disconnecting your WordPress.org username removes your photos from the directory. They stay on wp.org, they just stop being credited to a profile here.
Where to start
If you have a camera and have never submitted to the Photo Directory, start with one photo. Read the guidelines, pick your best frame, and send it. The queue is 24 to 36 hours and the feedback on a decline is specific enough to be useful.
If you have submitted before and never connected your WordPress.org username here, that is a one-field change and your entire back catalogue arrives on its own.
And if you just need a photo for something you are building: they are all free, all CC0, and someone in this community took every one of them.