“Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.”
LIFE has released over 10 million images on a new hosted image service from Google and in Google Image Search. They claim that 97% of the photos have never been seen by the public and that the collection contains “some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.” It’s certainly interesting to browse through.
Unlike The Commons project at Flickr, these images are not in the public domain. LIFE is selling fine art prints (in partnership with Qoop it seems) of the collection and the photos are only available online as 1 megapixel scans.
Having problems searching Google’s LIFE historic photo archive?
I’v created a solution for incomplete search results: http://lifephotosearch.net