Distributing the SasPlanet Cache

[phiggins]

SasPlanet has a variety of source for charts including Google Earth, Bing, Nokia and many others. It caches all of its maps as tiles in its cache directory.

It has a Download function that allows you to select an area and then download all the tiles for that area at one or more zoom levels.
You can change the cache location to something like C:\Cancun to Guatemala\GE\cache\ and then use the download function to download all the Google Earth tiles for that area by drawing a polygon around it. After downloading you can zip the cache which reduces the size to about one tenth.

I was thinking it would be an idea to provide an archive of all the zip files that anyone could contribute to so that they be available to everyone. They would download , unzip and copy into their SasPlanet cache. If they need a chart, just start GE2KAP. Or maybe someone could write a plugin for OpenCPN to create a chart directly from the zip files.

Any thoughts on this? Is it a worthwhile thing to do.