10 Million Photos from LIFE Magazine Archives Made Public

by Jarrett Martineau | November 18, 2008 at 07:19 pm
6328 views | 27 Recommendations | 5 comments

Google has partnered with LIFE Magazine to bring their archive of almost 10 million photos online.

About 20% of the collection was made public today through Google Image Search — and an estimated 97% of the collection has never been seen by the public until now.

First searches yielded amazing results for Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock — but there is much, much more to explore — dating as far back as 1750.

It is amazing to think that we now have easy, public acess to such an incredible collection.

What are your favourite collections? Post links to photos and galleries below.

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.
The LIFE.com site also indicates that the complete collection is forthcoming:
Welcome to the future home of LIFE.com, the most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web: 10 million photos from the legendary archives of LIFE magazine and thousands more added every day. Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you'll be able to find it here quickly, easily, and for free.
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frybrainrck83

this image is the reason I became a photographer

frybrainrck83 has contributed a photo to this story.

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Ravi Dixit

Great Story Jarrett... and thanks for bringing it up on the site...

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patgarcia

Wow, thanks for letting us know!

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Emilio Lizardo

I just watched Kubrick's Paths of Glory the other night ... WOW ! what a great film ... I will have to look for some stills from that production .

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danesller0127

It's a nice article, Jarrett' a 'kaleidoscope' of great people and events, thanks for sharing this... :)

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Rhonda J Mangus
First Flagged at 4:25 PM, Nov 18, 2008 by Rhonda J Mangus
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