Millions of historic photos archived at Google’s LIFE

Google just launched an improved version of Image Search with the availability of never-before-seen images or pictures or photos called LIFE an “Image Archive of Historic photos”.

They started sorting or can say collecting the images of the most popular and millions historic pictures from the 1750s to today. Google’s approach is clear that they are gonna have a complete unseen pictures grabbed from the good old hard copies and making never-before-seen images universally available, accessible and useful for the rest of LIFE.

This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s. As this is just a start, they have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. As of today about 20 percent of the collection is online; they say during the next few months, they will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos – Sounds WOW.

Well this sounds to me like a Wikipedia for Historic Images or Pictures? and they named it as LIFE.

And in the LIFE archive, you’ll notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn’t get much easier than that…..

When I just came across this news, I first searched for Mahatma Gandhi or Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who was a major political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement – but results are really disappointed – very very less collection of pictures. As they might monitor the searched entries, they might come up with a huge archive in the coming days :)

Anyways that’s really an awesome feature for the media people around the world to grab the quality historic pictures/images.

Good job Google, you always rock the world by introducing different, simple but effective/useful features.

Search tip:

No need to remember this big url to search for the historic LIFE archive

– http://images.google.com/hosted/life

You can just follow this simple tip from the Google homepage itself.

Add “source:life” to any Google image search and search only the LIFE photo archive. For example: computer source:life

Source: Official Google Blog