Pictures from the TIME LIFE Collection

TIME and LIFE are both respected publications that have been renowned for many, many years. LIFE magazine has always used some amazing pictures — even back in the days of black and white photography. Black and white photography may be seeing a revival now, but in those days color photography was not the norm and digital photography may not even have been imagined.

But even with all those limitations, the black and white pictures speak volumes — probably more than the images of today. First of all, the photographers then had to be experts — film was expensive and the photographer could only see the results of his or her work days after the actual shoot.

A few years ago, Google teamed up with the folks at LIFE magazine to bring this amazing collection within a special LIFE photo archive, with some pictures dating back to the 1750s. This was open to everyone — and you were free to use these pictures for non-commercial usage.

And that was great — but in a behavior that is not typical of Google, this search would often not work — and even when it worked, results were sparse. In fact, Google’s search for LIFE magazine pictures did not even show all pictures that they had indexed! And if you notice the area highlighted in red within the screen shot above, you’ll notice that they have not even updated the year of the copyright info — that still reads 2008 and we are in the year 2013 now!

People discussed this issue openly in Google’s own forums — and these forum participants exchanged ideas through which they could get over these limitations. And for now, there’s at least one site that provides a search option that gets you better results.

So go ahead and enjoy the pictures from another era — some of these pictures may be a little disturbing though — but they do bring some history alive!

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Tagged as: Media, Picture

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