Google will help The New York Times digitize over 5 million of its archived photos

The New York Times has a big task ahead for Google. It wants the tech company to help digitize its expansive photo collection in its “morgue” (a.k.a. the basement where it keeps its photo archive). With photos dating back to the 19^th century, the morgue has a collection of between five to seven million images, along with information about when and why these were published. Google’s machine vision and AI technology will not only help them digitize the photos, but also use its object recognition tools to extract information from the images to make these easier to catalog. The tech will help them categorize semantic information that can be lifted from the images and link these to data like locations and dates.

“[It’s] a treasure trove of perishable documents,” says the NYT’s Chief Technology Officer Nick Rockwell. “A priceless chronicle of not just The Times’s history, but of nearly more than a century of global events that have shaped our modern world.”

Source: The Verge