Google Resurrects Life Magazine Images

Life online photo gallery

Google launched the service on Tuesday as part of its image search function, starting with roughly two million photos stretching from the 1750s to today. Google added that it plans to enter all 10 million images from Life's photo library so that they can be viewed by anyone with an Internet connection. That's a boon, considering Life has said that more than 95 percent of its photo archive has never been publicly viewed or published in the magazine.

"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," Google software engineer Paco Galanes wrote on Google's blog.

Galanes continued: "This collection of newly digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by Life dating all the way back to the 1750s."

Life was established as a magazine in 1883 and eventually ceased publication in 2006.

Along with displaying the images online, Google said they can be printed for free as long as they are not being used to make money. Life's parent company, Time Warner, however, plans to sell high-resolution prints of the work though Qoop.com.

Life's archive contains images of nearly every memorable moment in modern history, including notable names like Joe DiMaggio, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Lindbergh, and world- changing events like the war in Vietnam, the World's Fair and the 1930s oil boom. The archive also includes the famed Zapruder film of President Kennedy's assassination and, which may be Life's most iconic photo, the image of an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945.