We’ve made it easier for you to test out the latest features of Photon. The download server for Photon dumps now offers experimental dumps made from the latest development version of Photon.

Thanks to the support of Graphhopper we have been able to offer weekly dumps of the Photon database. These make it really easy to get your own instance of Photon running: Download the dump, unpack it, start up Photon and you have your own private geocoder.

For those of you, who would like the easy handling of the dump but would like to try out the latest new features of Photon from the development branch, there are now experimental dumps. These are made weekly using the latest development version of Photon. Like with the regular dumps for the stable versions, there is a planet dump available as well as country extracts.

This is mainly for people with a bit of system administration experience but without the resources to set up a full Nominatim installation to make their own dumps. You still need to check out and compile your own Photon from the latest version from Github to use the dumps. The main directory contains a VERSION file, which tells you which commit of Photon was used to create the dumps. Usually though, the latest Photon version and the latest dump should work together.

The first new feature, you can try out with the experimental dumps, is the new layer parameter recently contributed by Matthieu Robin (thank you!).

With that you can filter results by their address level, e.g. state, city, street, house. This can for example be useful if you know that your users won’t search for exact addresses or POIs and only want to offer place names as suggestions.

The new layer parameter works for forward and reverse geocoding. It is currently only available together with the experimental dumps and the development version of Photon.