I don’t know exactly when it was added, but WordPress.com finally has a way to export your media uploads! When I moved off of WordPress.com, a couple of years ago, the only way to “get” your media was to export your posts, and your new site would download the files as the posts that used them were imported. This was obviously very error-prone, wouldn’t work for media not used in posts, and spectacularly failed to work for me — leaving a great deal of my uploaded media stranded on the WordPress servers. With this new export option I’ve just downloaded 1.5GB of media from two sites I had hosted on the service, so I might finally be able to reconstruct several old posts. Happy days!