We have always been more that happy to produce and give out bulk dumps
on demand to anyone who asks, but the above site is the start of
producing pre-packaged dumps, ready to download at any time.

At the moment they are all `mysqldump` produced text files ready to
import directly into a MySQL 5+ database (after ungzip'ing!). The data
is split up into multiple tables so only need to download what need,
but its of course possible to rejoin them back into combined table
(s).

It's of course possible to create other formats or compression methods
- let us know your thoughts. Another possibility is to put
uncompressed versions on a rsync host, so can do reasonably effienct
incremental updates (rsync can compress on the fly, and will only
transfer changes parts of files) - again let us know if interest in
this.

The only caveat is the data doesn't include enough info to build a
link to the image file on our servers. We are doing this because we
don't want to make it easy for people to spider large quantities of
images, however contact us and we will see what we can do... we are
normally happy to allow hotlinking of thumbnail images as long as we
know about it.
(some of you already have this data in the already downloaded data,
let me know individually and can supply info how to get the data to go
with these dumps)

- oh and of course provided there is interest we will periodically
recreate the files to keep them updated!

Enjoy!

Barry
Geograph