What Everybody Ought to Know About Life.com

LIFE.com, is now offering the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the Web (currently over 7,000,000 and 3,000+ added every day).

LIFE and Getty Images, have joined forces to provide you instant access to millions of photographs — for FREE. Taken by the world’s top photographers and curated by LIFE editors, they tell the story of our times — our heroes, our stars, our celebrations and heartbreak, the events etched in our memory and the small moments that make life sweet. When you find a photo you like, you'll be able to share it, print it, and sometimes even buy it. You can also sign up their weekly "Picks of the Week" E-newsletter.

Life was once America's leading photo-centric news magazine, Life chronicled the nation and the world for seven decades before issuing its last print publication in 2007. Life's last editor, Bill Shapiro, who heads up the new project, wants students, teachers, and parents to use the site to make history more tangible. "The most iconic moments in American history -- we have those," Shapiro reports. "We didn't want simply to create a historical repository or a dusty archive. We wanted these events to feel as alive as they did when they happened."

Photos on the site are organized into five channels: news, celebrity, travel, animals, and sports. Visitors can print individual images and share them through sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Delicious. New features of Life.com, due to roll out in the coming months, will allow users to create their own photo galleries (on, say, the life and work of Maya Angelou, for English class, or animal life in the Everglades, for science). All the site's tools will be FREE.

The new site also allows visitors to flip through a series of Life covers on World War II or compare portraits of Miss America 1945 and Miss America 2009. A search for "civil rights" turns up 7,104 photos and 10 curated galleries on such themes as the vote, the Freedom Riders, and Coretta Scott King. A search for F. Scott Fitzgerald returns 21 photos. Albert Einstein: 187. Jackie Robinson: 248. Many of the photos and captions, taken together, tell a full story.

I had forgotten how much I missed Life magazine. I hope you enjoy this new site! J.T.