Wikix has been open sourced under the GNU Public License. This program will read any XML dump from the foundation and create paralell processes which will download all images for a given Wikimedia Project. The program also contains full UTF8 detection and conversion if enabled.
For all the folks wondering how to get the images, download the code, build it, and run it from linux or Windows and 36 hours later, Commons, or any Wikimedia project images will be downloaded. This one is free. The other tools cost money. :-)
Download link:
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/MediaWiki/wikix.tar.gz.bz2
Enjoy.
Jeff