http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...1988174.column
New life for huge Life photo collection on Google
By Steve Johnson
Suddenly one of the great photography troves in history is available online, free, and even ready for your download and manipulation.
The Life magazine photos archive went up this week, hosted by Google (images. google.com/hosted/life), chronicling the 20th Century in a breathtaking series of frozen moments.
To Joe the Computer Surfer, this means you can download not only Alfred Eisenstaedt's glorious Marilyn Monroe-in-black turtleneck image that ran in the magazine, but also the other frames he shot that day.
You can download images of the (last) Great Depression to your computer and, if you disagree with the original cropping, frame them in your own way and use them to illustrate your school report. You can print them up—the resolution is good enough for 8-by-10 prints—and decorate your house with, as Life President Andrew Blau says, "world history seen through American eyes."
The only restrictions are against using the pictures for commercial purposes. Why is Life, no longer a magazine but to be reborn as a Web site (Life.com) early next year, giving people the milk for free?
"We don't think we're giving away the store," Blau says. "We have 10 million images, some of the most important in world history, and they're not being seen. To have the entire collection in a warehouse in Jersey City is not to the benefit of the photography."
Here's the link again:
http://images.google.com/hosted/life