Google hosts Life’s archive, 10 million iconic images now free

Google has taken up the task of hosting 10 million historic photos from the archives of the famous American photojournal Life. Discontinued in the year 2000, Life was the first photo-centric magazine, and its poignant images often came to be iconic of crucial historical events, people, places, trends, and culture. Over 2 million of these photos can already be found at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, with millions more to come within months. Upto 97 percent of these images have never been published. The photos are of course of excellent quality, and Google’s versions of them are available at an average resolution of 1280×1000. The spectacular pictures, illustrations and photos date back to the mid 19th century and include previously unseen images of Jackie Kennedy, Times Square and the Vietnam war for instance, under categories such as “People”, “Places” and “Events”. In addition, you can also browse by decade, from the 1860s to the 1970s.