Template:LIFE

The LIFE-Google partnership was announced on November 18, 2008. Over 10 million images from the photo collection of the now defunct LIFE magazine were digitized by Google and hosted on Google Image Search. The collection is extremely valuable as it spans several decades of US and world history.

This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. Time Inc., which owns LIFE magazine, has announced that "97% of the photographs have never been seen by the public." Most of the images should thus use the {{PD-US-unpublished}} tag if appropriate.

Since the overwhelming majority of the images were never published, the {{PD-US}} and {{PD-US-expired}} tags should not be used since they only deal with works published (not simply created) before 1929. The year on an image's Google description page generally corresponds to the year of creation (Date taken) and does not give any indication regarding publication. An image simply taken before 1929 may still be under copyright in the US if it has never been published. Generally, only images created before 1904 or those whose author died before 1954 should be hosted on Commons.

Finally, images with the caption "For personal non-commercial use only" should not be hosted on Commons, unless it can be ascertained that the image is in the public domain, in which case Time Inc.'s copyright notice would constitute copyfraud. See Commons:Licensing for more information.

Update on licensing: it turns out it's much less clear than this, because nearly all images old enough to be public domain were not created by LIFE, and so are likely to have been previously published, but Google gives no information on publication dates or country of first publication. It's a giant mess of poor recordkeeping and you can ask me more about it. Dcoetzee (talk) 07:12, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

This template uses three parameters:

• id – This is the only mandatory parameter. It corresponds to the filename in the image's URL. The filename consists of 16 letters and digits.
• location – This parameter is optional. It should not appear in the template if the information is not available; it will default to location unknown.
• year – This parameter is optional. It should not appear in the template if the information is not available; it will default to year unknown.

Example used here: File:Gandhi and Laxmidas 2.jpg

{{LIFE|id=ab09cdab4ac27dc3|location=Rajkot|year=1886}}

The parameter "location=xxx" determines the Wikimedia storage category name, in the form as "Category:Images from LIFE Photo Archive, location xxx". Some examples:

location=Italy   location=US   location=Germany   location=Venice, Italy     location=NY, US

A location-category need not exist to be used. Grouping can be by country name, or city, etc. The existing LIFE location-categories are: show-location-categories.