Incredible news, actually, if you hadn’t already heard
Millions of never-before-seen photos from the dusty archives of Life magazine will soon be unearthed and immortalized online, thanks to a new initiative from Google Inc.
Yesterday, the search engine kingpin announced that the Life magazine photo archive will now be available through Google’s Image Search feature. The collection is estimated to consist of more than 10 million photos, many of which were never published in the magazine and only exist as negatives, slides and etchings.
“This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google software engineer Paco Galanes wrote on the company’s official blog.
“This collection of newly digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by Life dating all the way back to the 1750s.”
Life was first published in 1883 as a general-interest magazine and for more than a century was the pre-eminent magazine for American photojournalism. It went through several incarnations in the latter half of the 20th century, was rescued from closing several times and eventually ceased publishing in 2006.
[From reportonbusiness.com: Life magazine images find new life on Google]
So much history contained therein. Only a small percentage of the collection is currently available, but more is going to be added in the upcoming months.
From the official Google announcement:
The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today.
We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.
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.
[From Official Google Blog: LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search]
A veritable boon to photography buffs, historians of all stripes, and students of the 20th century. Awesome. Search/browse for yourself using this link