Google Takes The LIFE Photo Archive To The Mainsteam

Last monthly Google quietly announced a partnership with LIFE Magazine to bring their entire archive of offline photos to the web. Today they bring it to the masses by advertising it on the Google Images homepage. This is one of Google’s most prominent achievements as they continue to try and organize the offline web online. This last week Google announced that you will now be able to search magazine online, another big step for the grand mission that is Google Book Search.
The collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s. A majority of the images have never been published and most the ones that did have only been seen by few collectors and historians. In the process, Google searched (by hand) the dusty archives which contained negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints that needed to be converted. As of last month during the testing period, they had about 20 percent of the collection online or around 2 million photos. Now, they are nearing completion of the 10 million total photos.