Hi Asaf,

Based on this need, I'm building a downloader tool (as a volunteer; this isn't done in my WMF role) to help create such collections of reduced-resolution (any size you want) images for a given Commons category.  It's not quite ready for use, but in the meantime I've created the collection you wanted in the size you specified.  It is 157 megabytes in size, and you can download it (in a 7-Zip[1] archive) from here[2].

You might want to check out my CommonsDownloader <https://github.com/Commonists/CommonsDownloader>

It quite does that, except for the category thing but it would be fairly trivial to add.

Java users may also be interested in Édouard Hue implementation
<https://github.com/edouardhue/commons-downloader>

-- 
Jean-Fred