Life Magazine, the first all-photo news magazine from the U.S., has just released it’s photo archive via Google. The archive comprising of over 2 million photos is available on a special page launched by Google where you can browse the entire collection by topic or date. The image archive is also searchable through Google Image search by adding the parameter “source:life” in the search query. This is great news for all who love vintage photos.
Google says that many of the images available in the collection were never actually published by Life.
Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.
Inside the archive you can access the full sized image, and since most of these photos are very old (some dating back to the 1750s!) they fall under the public domain. So you can publish, edit and share the photos at will.
[via Official Google Blog]
There are so many unseen photos in the archive that will blow people away. I used to work in the archive department of Time. You should try printing these images and placing them on a vision board. Ever heard of one? Check one out at http://www.TheVisionBoardKit.com