Erik Zachte wrote:
Ariel:
Providing multiple terabyte sized files for download doesn't make any kind of sense to me. However, if we get concrete proposals for categories of Commons
images people really want
and would use, we can put those together. I think this has been said before on wikitech-l if not here.
There is another way to cut down on download size, which would serve a whole class of content re-users, e.g. offline readers. For offline readers it is not so important to have pictures of 20 Mb each, rather to have pictures at all, preferably 10's Kb's in size. A download of all images, scaled down to say 600x600 max would be quite appropriate (...)
I made this tool last month, precisely to allow easy downloading all images from a given category (inspired by WLM needs). http://toolserver.org/~platonides/catdown/catdown.php
Your download is just a tiny script with the list of urls to download, but enough for doing it without further manual intervention. There's also a nice estimate on how much space you will need to finish the download.