New York Times Digitizes Millions of Archived Photos with Google Cloud

The New York Times has been archiving millions of editorial photos for over 100 years. It's hard to believe that these photos were previously stored in hundreds of filing cabinets underground in Times Square - a place aptly named "the morgue".

These images have immense historical value - most of them cannot be found anywhere else in the world. To preserve and optimize the use of these archives - while making them more accessible - The New York Times has partnered with Google Cloud.

The New York Times uses the advantages of machine learning with the help of the Google Cloud Vision API to determine the content of each image and classify it in this way. This means that manual descriptions are no longer necessary. The team also uses Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud SQL to improve disaster recovery while transforming their photo archive into a unique content management system.