Photography News

Swiss Data Group recently announced the redesign and relaunch of Swiss Picture Bank, an archival-quality online photo storage site for serious photographers that guarantees the safety and security of images for 99 years.

Photos uploaded to Swiss Picture Bank are stored in a secure, quadruple-redundant data archive where they can be accessed online at any time and downloaded in full resolution at will.

Current functionalities of Swiss Picture Bank include:

Archival-quality storage: Each photo uploaded to Swiss Picture Bank is archived at full resolution in four separate locations for redundancy, including: a Hitachi Content Archive Platform archival-quality storage system; a hard drive array in a separate data center; a magnetic tape system housed in a Swiss bank vault; and a second magnetic tape system kept in a military bunker under the Swiss Alps. Swiss Picture Bank’s entire infrastructure is operated by Swisscom, the leading outsourced provider of IT services to Swiss banks. 99-year guarantee: Swiss Picture Bank protects users with the only guarantee in the industry: photos will be kept safe, secure and accessible for 99 years or double your money back. Service continuity protection: Swiss Picture Bank partners with the Foundation for Data Permanence (FDP), a not-for-profit organization devoted to keeping online data safe forever. The FDP acts as a trust fund for data, ensuring that photos will still be accessible to users even in the worst-case scenario that a participating company goes out of business. Unique pricing structure: Swiss Picture Bank features a unique pricing structure, with one-time payments and no recurring fees -- and a dramatically cheaper price when compared to the recurring annual payments required by other, less secure services. Users can buy space as they need it in increments of one gigabyte, and there is no upper limit on the amount they can purchase. Improved sharing and organization: Swiss Picture Bank allows users to easily share photos and sort them by date uploaded, date taken or user-created albums. Green technologies: All archive systems are powered by clean energies in Switzerland, and are 98% carbon free.

For more information on Swiss Picture Bank, visit http://www.swisspicturebank.com.

Diana Topan