Life Magazine

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:37pm on Sunday, September 27th, 2009

September 23, 2009: Life Inc. announced today that more than 1,860 issues from the Life magazine archive are now available online through Google Books. The scanned magazines cover Life magazine issues from 1936-1972, allowing readers to search and view full contents of the magazine.

This is the first time that the public will have comprehensive electronic access to entire Life magazine issues. The scanned issues will include the stories and images from Life's renowned staff of editors and photographers including Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks. In addition to the covers, articles and extraordinary photographs, readers will also be able to search and view the original covers, advertisements, letters to the editor and more.

"Life magazine was there for every historical event, cultural shift, and pop culture occurrence," says Andrew Blau, Life Inc. President. "From our first issue in 1936 featuring President Franklin Roosevelt's work relief project to coverage of Apollo 11, Marilyn Monroe, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Beatles, the beehive and everything in between. Every day we receive requests from readers looking for these issues for research purposes, and to find photos and articles featuring family members, hometowns and other memories. Now with these full issues available online, readers will be able to browse through history as it was being recorded."

"We're tremendously excited to partner with Life Inc.," said Andrew Madden, Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google. "Our partnership will enable millions of people around the world to discover and access Life Magazine's iconic archive online."

This announcement follows a previous partnership between Google and Life Inc. in November 2008, with Life making the contents of its image collection available through Google Image Search. The Life photography collection on Google Image Search includes more than 10 million images.

Users may search through the Google Life archive by visiting www.books.google.com.

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 9:52pm on Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Time Inc. and Getty Images launched the new Life magazine web site on March 31. 2009. The new site gives users access to over seven million photos from the Life and Getty Images archives.

In September 2008, the two companies announced their plans:

"Time Inc. and Getty Images will jointly launch LIFE.com, the companies announced today at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX Conference in New York City. LIFE.com will be jointly owned and operated by Time Inc. and Getty Images, and will provide access to the most comprehensive iconic and professional photography collections available anywhere online. Andy Blau, president of LIFE and SVP of Time Inc. Interactive, and Catherine Gluckstein, vice president of iStockphoto and Consumer Markets at Getty Images, will serve as CEO and CFO, respectively.

“LIFE.com brings together the two most-recognized brands in photography, making the defining images of our times even more accessible to people everywhere,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images. “We are thrilled to partner with Time Inc. on the launch of this exciting new venture.”

LIFE.com will offer access to thousands of new photographs from Getty Images’ award-winning photographers, including today’s news, entertainment, sports, celebrities, travel, animals and many others. Consumers will also have access to millions of images from LIFE magazine, many of which have never been seen by the public. The collection contains the historic photos that LIFE published through the decades, in addition to many never-before-seen pictures of Hollywood stars, sports heroes, important people and events from the ‘30’s though the ‘90’s. Getty Images will be providing the majority of images at launch from its comprehensive archival and current collections. More than 3,000 new images will be uploaded daily from Getty Images."

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:40pm on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

On November 18, 2008, Google announced that they will make the entire Life magazine photo archive available on Googe image search. At the Official Google Blog, software engineer Paco Galanes wrote:

"The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you'll see in Google Image Search today.

"We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

"Only a very 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. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos."