Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Pictures

Time Warner is making available Life's entire archive of pictures: LIFE photo archive hosted by Google. They can be used by anyone, free, so long as the use is non-profit. According to the AP:
The new service, available at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with about 2 million photos. Eventually, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life's library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection.

About 97 percent of Life's archives have not been publicly seen, according to Life.

The photos can be printed out for free as long as they aren't being used as part of an attempt to make money. Time Warner Inc., Life's parent company, hopes to make money by selling high-resolution, framed prints. The orders will be processed through Qoop.com.

Life's archives include photos from the Civil War as well as some of the most memorable moments from the 20th century, including the Zapruder film capturing John F. Kennedy's assassination.
There are many images from before the Time/Life era. The locomotive was photographed in 1900. The general is William Tecumseh Sherman from the Civil War and William Marcy Tweed bossed Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine in New York City. This is going to be a wonderful resource for students and teachers of American history [I taught US History to high school students for many years]. It is fun to just browse among them. Go to the site! To get some sense of the quality of the images, just click on the examples I've posted here.

Thanks to Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things for the references.

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

2 comments:

  1. This is a great resource. I wish I could find the "free use" clause on their site. But I'm not finding any terms of use there at all. Just the comment in the AP article.

    ReplyDelete
  2. If I get a "cease and desist" letter from them, I'll let you know.

    ReplyDelete

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