We are happy to announce that this week new versions of Nominatim and its ElasticSearch frontend Photon have been released.

Version 4.4.0 of Nominatim brings many bug fixes and performance improvements for the new Python frontend, which was introduced in version 4.3.0. It can now be considered stable and has become the frontend recommended to be used for new installations. You find deployment guides for the Python frontend in the documentation. There is no need to reimport your existing database. It will work perfectly fine with the new frontend.

A new feature in this release is experimental support for exporting a Nominatim database to SQLite. The SQLite database can then be used with the new Python frontend or when using the Nominatim library. For more information about this, watch the talk at SotM-EU 2023 or read about it in the SQLite blog posts.

Version 0.5.0 of Photon brings back the ability to update a Photon database from a Nominatim database. The new mechanism is better decoupled from the Nominatim update process, making it easier to handle. A long-standing issue around UIDs of house numbers documents has been fixed so that all data should now be correctly handled. This version also introduces a new API endpoint /nominatim-update/status which allows scripts to check if an update is already in progress. To find out if your Photon database is indeed up-to-date use the newlt added /status endpoint.

If you do not use the update facility, then the Photon release remains compatible with version 0.4 database dumps including the ones available on https://download1.graphhopper.com/public. If you want to run updates, you need to create a fresh import using this release. Please be aware that updates now require an additional preparation step. Consult the README for more information.