Life goes live

Life.com is a joint venture between Time Inc, which owns the LIFE archives, and the Getty Images photo service.

The website features pictures from LIFE and new photos from Getty.

It is organised in galleries featuring classic LIFE photographs on subjects such as World War II or the US space programme alongside recent pictures, such as a series on Natasha Richardson, the actress who died recently as the result of a freak skiiing accident.

Talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres was brought in as a "guest editor" for the opening to help pick a series of "cutest dog" pictures.

Selected photos on the site are available for purchase.

Internet giant Google and Time have also announced plans to put the entire LIFE collection online at images.google.com/hosted/life.

The collection includes pictures from renowned photojournalists such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and W Eugene Smith.

Time Inc, part of the Time Warner media empire, is the largest magazine publisher in the United States with more than 120 titles.

Getty Images was founded in 1995 and was purchased last year by Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm, for $2.4bn.

Agence France-Presse has a content-sharing agreement with Getty, under which the US firm distributes digital photographs provided by the French news agency.