The Geograph British Isles project, which aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland, has started releasing torrents of their photographs available for anyone to download and use.

The project has divided the area of Great Britain and Ireland into a grid with equal size squares and users can submit representative photographs for each square.  One of Geograph British Isles’ hope is that by incentivizing their users to submit high quality photos of their country they are encouraging them to get out and explore, learn, and appreciate their country more. Below is an example image from a square Longnor, Shropshire, Great Britain:

CC:BY-SA – Adrian Bailey

Geograph British Isles is making available torrents of all images in the database, which currently has 860,000 images, in 50,000 image sections.  “Everything in the torrents — images and metadata — is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, and the RDF file references the licence terms for each item in the volume.”

“If anyone would like access to lots of geolocated images, or is simply able to help us seed the torrents – be my guest!” – Paul Dixon, software developer for the project.