life magazine on a newsstand.
One of the biggest photo collections in the world that ranges from the 1880s through to the seminal moments of the 20th century and on into the present day was made available to the public online from today.

The bulk of the archive is from Life magazine, the premier platform for photojournalists in the 20th century.

About 10m images will be available, from Marilyn Monroe and JFK to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. About 97% of the pictures have never been seen before.

Google announced today it had done a deal with Life to put their pictures online. Also available is work from other archives, much of it collected by the former Time publisher, Henry Luce.

The collection includes the entire works of Life photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili and Nina Leen. Also available are: the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York from the 1880's; and Hugo Jaeger Nazi-era Germany 1937-1944.

RJ Pittman, director of product management at Google, said: "We are very excited to bring this amazing collection of photos and etchings form the archives to the internet.

"With so many never before seen images, this is going to be a real benefit to the public."

Among pictures he thought had not been seen before was one of London Bridge from the 1800s.

About 20% of the collection went online today.

Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for TimeInc, the archives in their entirety would be available in the first quarter of next year. She said it was would not just be historical. "We will be adding new things. There will be thousands of new pictures from DC for the inauguration on January 20," she said.

Life magazine is now defunct but lives on on the internet as Life.com.

Millions of images have been scanned and made available on Google Image Search.
Google, in a press statement, said: "The effort to bring offline images online was inspireed by our mission to organise all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

It added: "Only a 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.

http://images.google.com/images?q=elvis&q=source%3Alife

Das ist eines der wichtigsten Bildarchive des 20. Jahrhunderts und geht zurück bis vor den Bürgerkrieg der USA.
Großartige Sache, das.
Sucht mal z.B. nach Hiroshima oder Titanic.
Oder Joe McCarthy.

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