Online LIFE Magazine Photo Archive

Google has partnered with LIFE Magazine to digitize the photos and etchings from their archive. A Google blog post mentioned that only a small percentage of these photos have previously been published. Google has begun to digitize the images from this archive of 10 million photos. Many historical and cultural photographs are already online - for example, there are many Civil War photographs with descriptions. One can also click on each picture to see a full size image. These photos can be used for personal, noncommercial use. One can find these images on the "Life Photo Archive" page.


Another way to access these photos is to do a search in Google images using the search term "source:life", along with your topic word. For example, to see pictures of the Olympic games from the LIFE archive, type in "olympics source:life" in the search box on the Google images search page. Click here to view this example.

Another large archive of historical photographs is now available on the Flickr website. Flickr has partnered with the Library of Congress to host a sampling of their digital photo collection. You can also search the full Library Of Congress Prints and Photographs Online catalog here. This archive includes approximately one million images. More information about this archive can be found here.