The download server for Photon now offers ready-to-use database dumps for over 200 countries. Setting up your own geocoding server was never easier.

Photon is a geocoding server software based on Nominatim. Photon takes the data from a Nominatim database and loads it into an ElasticSearch database. As such it combines the advanced OpenStreetMap data processing mechanism of Nominatim with the powerful text search capabilities of ElasticSearch. It is multi-lingual and offers auto-complete functionality.

To make it easier for you to set up your own Photon server, we provide ready-made database dumps. Creating your own setup is done in three quick steps:

  1. Download and extract a dump from https://download1.graphhopper.com/public/
  2. Download the latest release jar of Photon
  3. Run the server: java -jar photon-*.jar

The server is now ready at http://localhost:2322. For more information on building and running photon, visit the photon github page.

The database dump of the planet is still pretty large. With 66GB download size, it needs more than 130GB free disk space to run. For those of you who are tight on disk space and don’t need searching the entire planet, we now offer smaller country-wide database for over 200 countries. Like the planet dump, they are updated once a week. You find the new extracts under

https://download1.graphhopper.com/public/extracts/by-country-code/

There is one directory for each country named by country code.

Many thanks to Graphhopper for making this service possible.