Yesterday Geograph got its 500,000th photo – the archive now contains over half a million, freely reusable, geographical and geolocated images!

Rather serendipitously, the image that tipped the balance was of a milepost marker, taken by Martin Bodman.

Remember, all the photos are licenced with a Creative Commons by-sa-2.0 licence, making an astonishly useful resource which we hope will become a lasting archive.

Here’s to the next milestone – one million images! We should hit that sometime before December 2008…

Some awesome images popping up on geograph covering the floods (for example, see thread, registration required). A particular sequence taken by Jonathan Billinger shows how swiftly things can change for the worse…

	20th July 2007, 5:12pm – Evesham Waterside hotel. The river Avon is over the road…
	20th July 2007, 6:28pm – a little over an hour later, and the road is flooded but a brave driver might just make it!.
	20th July 2007, 8:03pm – after 3 hours though, the road is impassable and the hotel is starting to flood. How bad can it get you wonder?
	21st July 2007, 5:51am – you wake up early the next morning and this sight greets you! The water is still rising too…
	21st July 2007, 1:51pm – less than 24 hours have passed and the water level peaks.
	22nd July 2007, 7:04am – the next morning, and the waters are starting to recede.

There’s always an inescapable voyeurism with natural disasters like this, and while I feel for those affected by the floods, you can’t help but see images like this and say “wow!”