Google Hosts Life Mag Image Archive

By Anastasia Tubanos, November 21, 2008
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November 21, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- According to several reports on Thursday, search engine giant Google (www.google.com) has signed a deal with Time Warner to launch an extensive online photo gallery featuring millions of never before seen images from the legendary Life magazine's archives.

The new service, which is available on Google Image Search, debuted on Tuesday with about two million images. However, the collection is estimated to consist of more than 10 million photos, about 97 percent of which have never been published. The image archive will most likely be hosted in one of Google's "dozens of data centers."

Image from Life Magazine's online photo gallery.

"We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive," writes Paco Galanes, a software engineer in Google's Official Blog. "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."

The collection includes images from Life photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili and Nina Leen as well as the Mansell Collection from London, Dahlstrom glass plates of New York, Hugo Jaeger on Nazi-era Germany and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

As part of the deal between Time and Google, the new gallery will eventually become part of Life's website, which is scheduled to launch the photo archive in February.

The Associated Press reports that the photos from the archives can currently be printed out for free as long as they aren't being used as a profiting device. However, Time Warner, Life magazine's parent company, says it hopes to eventually make money by selling high-resolution, framed prints.

Google says this partnership with Life magazine represents its "biggest undertaking in professional photography," and hopes to work out similar deals with other immense photo archives in the near future.