In an announcement that surprised those who remember LIFE magazine’s recently publicized plan to relaunch Life.com in partnership with Getty Images, Time Inc. said it is putting over 10 million images online using Google. Millions of images, 97% of which have never been seen by the public, have already been digitized and made available on Google’s new image-hosting service.
Users can search the LIFE collection by either visiting its Google landing page or typing source:life after keywords entered into Google’s main and image search engines. The LIFE archive featured on Google will include all 10 million images in the collection within months. It will be among the largest digitized-photography collections on the Web.
LIFE executive vice president John Squires said: “This initiative continues our efforts to build valuable new revenue opportunities from our rich heritage.” However, the method of generating revenue is not immediately apparent. According to the announcement, the images hosted by Google are only available for personal and research purposes.
Search-result pages containing medium-size, unwatermarked images—comparable to stock-image comping sizes—identify the image as belonging to the LIFE collection and provide photographer and subject-matter information but do not contain either copyright information or usage guidelines.
In addition, the images are of relatively high quality. The mid-size images are suitable for online publishing, and the larger-size watermarked version offered through a separate link will produce an image of 3.4 inches by 4.3 inches at print resolution.
The collection contains much iconic imagery by great photojournalists. Though it also includes red-carpet and news coverage through the early 2000s, LIFE is primarily thought of as a collection of images such as the featured 1944 World War II image of an American soldier holding a dying infant, taken by W. Eugene Smith.
LIFE is also making fine art photographic prints available to consumers through QOOP.com. How these developments affect previous Life.com plans is not yet known.