Image banking the Swiss Way

February 18, 2008 by Leonard Goh
Cnet Asia

Swiss banks are known best for its integrity and safety. So it is a natural choice to go with the Swiss when choosing an image bank to back up your digital images.

Swiss Picture Bank is an online storage site for your digital images. Pretty much like a real bank, you can "deposit" or/and "withdraw" your images anytime, anywhere with an Internet connection.

Swiss Picture Bank promises to keep the images you deposit with them safe for up to a lifetime, depending on which plan you purchase. The pricing starts from US$0.03 per image for 30 years to US$0.06 for 99 years. What's more, you only have to pay once. There is no monthly or yearly subscription plan that you have to look out for.

The Swiss Picture Bank is partner with Swisscom IT Services and its subsidiary company, Comit. The latter provides the IT infrastructure to Swiss banks so you can have a peace of mind when you choose to store your pictures with the company.

Swiss Picture Bank is backed by the Picture Guarantee Foundation, a non-profit, independent foundation that was established to ensure that the images would be secure. All the files are duplicated, encrypted and stored on several different servers in Switzerland so you can be sure that there will always be a copy.

In the unfortunate event that Swiss Picture Bank loses any of your images, it will pay you back 30 times the amount you spent to back up that particular picture. But it is so confident that this will never happen that it states on its website, "...we'll never have to try".

Uploading is a breeze with the Photobot Guardian. The program is installed in your computer and you can set it to monitor several folders. When you add new images to these folders, the Photobot Guardian will automatically upload them to the database. This free program will be available soon for download here. Alternatively, you can also upload your images via the Swiss Picture bank Web site.

For the environmental conscious, you'll be glad to know that Swiss Picture Bank's data centers are powered by hydroelectric plants (energy supplies that is 98 percent carbon-free) scattered across Switzerland.

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