Life's images get new lease of life at Google

LONDON: Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Britney Spears, Cindy Crawford, Mata Hari, Monica Lewinsky….. Gandhiji, Martin Luther King, JFK, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama…. Pin-up beauties from Playboy to the cowboy heroes of Hollywood… you name them and they are there online.

Life magazine, which boasts of the largest collection of celebrity images, events and places has finally gone online with the majority of its image archives, thanks to Google.

The image collection that went online on Tuesday ranges from the icons and events of the 19th century to the heroes of out times.

Life magazine, the premier platform for photojournalists in the 20th century, said nearly 97 per cent of these images have never gone public before.

The images gone online include the works of renowned photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili and Nina Leen and also the events that shook the world like the world war, Vietnam war, Nazi atrocities and so on. The images are being sourced from Time Inc as well.

While nearly 20 per cent of the images have gone online now, the remaining ones will also be uploaded soon.

"The 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," said Google about the venture.

"Only a 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."

Google has opened an online photo gallery that will feature millions of images from Life magazine's archives that have never been seen by the public before.

The image gallery, available at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, currently has around 2 million photos. Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life's library and it is considered Google's biggest undertaking in professional photography.