United Press International has teamed up with Digital Railroad to make an archive of over 300,000 UPI images searchable and available for licensing. You can search the archive without payment at http://www.upinewspictures.com/. I talked about a UPI archive back in 2003 but that one only had 100,000 pictures available.

There are several ways to view the archive, but you can start with a simple keyword search. A search for Paul Simon found over five dozen results, but the interesting thing is that a bunch of them weren’t of the singer himself, but rather of tributes, awards shows where he also received an award and that was noted in the caption, etc. The further back you go (photos are initially organized with the newest ones first), the more relevant the photos get. The photos for that search go back to 1997.

A nav on the left of the results page will allow you to narrow the search down with additional keywords, date the pictures were taken, photographer, and more. The pictures themselves are good-sized thumbnails with a little information. Detail pages provide good-sized pictures (watermarked all over the place) with lots of picture details.

If you register for an account (this is free) you’ll have the opportunity to save pictures to a lightbox, as well as create keyword-based RSS feeds of UPI images, which would be cool if I could get it to work. I went to photo feeds, was prompted to create a custom feed, then was asked to log in. Logged in, was kicked back to the home page, chose photo feeds again, was prompted to log in, and around and around and around we go.

There’s a lot here, but I wish I could have gotten the photo feeds to work!

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