Life Magazine: From Dead to the Web
Life magazine is back from the dead (for the third time). The latest incarnation is in the form of a website, Life.com. And it’s not just a bland archive of their tremendous image collection.
Users will be able to share Life images via social websites and create customized printed books or magazines. Framed prints are also advertised on the site but this feature is either not implemented or was only available for selected images when I visited (none of the Muhammad Ali images I looked at had the “Purchase” button).
So how big is the archive? The site doesn’t mention specific numbers only saying that it’s “the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web.”
According to the Digits blog at the Wall Street Journal, scanners have been digitizing approximately 21,000 images per day for the past 2 years in building the image database. I’ll let you do the math.