So these images gog uses in email look fantastic would be great for archivists to set as default folder images for games.

What i mean is every email sent about a game has an image associated with it that's this size and resolution. Is there a way to find them for all the other games?

An API call per gamecard or something?

This is perfect thank you... so to get it complete just find releases from the start of the year and all is good?

More or less yes. In the catalog (or the front page catalog view, in the popular/new/upcoming/on sale section), open the picture url and replace the _###.jpg with .png to get the lossless image. Similar thing for the library images (mostly for unbundled games) and the background of the gamepages.