LIFE photo archive now in Google
Hellbrun Gardens, Frankfurt, Germany. August 1950
Google has put the LIFE magazine photo archive in image search results! They announced it Tuesday. By early 2009, 10 million images from the LIFE collection will be online!
Just type “source:life” after the name of what you want to find and click “Search images.” See outtakes from your favorite photographers, images that were never published, who knows?
Add this to the Flickr Commons effort, which digitizes images from some of the world’s premier museums and libraries (Smithsonian, Eastman House, Library of Congress among them), and the average person now has more direct access to historic photography than anyone could have dreamed.
I tried putting up a gallery of cool LIFE images I found but as usual WordPress is making things a lot harder than it should and the supposed gallery tool makes a mess. I’m leaving the mess up so I can try to get help with it. Looks like crap, I know.
It turns out that the screengrabs were in Grayscale mode, and the WordPress gallery tool needs them to be in RGB to register correctly. I’m just going to leave them as is below since I’ve already spent too much time trying to figure out why they weren’t lining up nicely. Just go to Google and see a whole bunch of pictures from the archive.
tree in Charleston, Andreas Feininger
