A property claim lands on a loss adjuster's desk after a burst pipe flooded a rented flat. The tenant's photos show the ceiling stain, the swollen skirting boards and a ruined carpet. The insurer's reviewer asks one question before paying: were these photos edited? The adjuster has the files, but no way to show what they looked like on the day they were taken. This is what people mean when they search for claims photo evidence tamper proof: a way to answer that question before anyone asks it.
The short answer
You cannot make a photo prove it was never edited before you sealed it. What you can do is fix the file in time: seal the original image as soon as it reaches you, and from then on you can show that the file is exactly the one that existed at that moment. If anyone changes a single byte afterwards, the seal no longer matches. The honest claim is "unchanged since sealing", not "unedited since the shutter clicked".
Why photos get challenged
A photo file is easy to alter and easy to re-save. Cropping, brightening or removing an object leaves a file that looks normal. The date shown in a file's properties is written by a device or a program, and a clock can be set to any day. So when a payout depends on a picture, the other side has a reasonable doubt to raise, and an adjuster has nothing but the file itself to answer it with.
What sealing does to an image file
According to the how it works page, you upload the file and the original is never altered. A cryptographic hash, a fingerprint of the file, is computed and sent to Swisscom Trust Services for sealing. You receive a certificate with a trusted timestamp under RFC 3161, the document hash, and a public verification link that anyone can open without an account. The page lists JPG, PNG and TIFF among the supported image formats.
Any change to the file, even a single byte, produces a different hash. That is what lets you show that the image in the claim file is the image that was sealed.
What the timestamp is worth in a dispute
Under Article 41 of the eIDAS Regulation, an electronic time stamp cannot be denied legal effect or admissibility as evidence solely because it is electronic. A qualified electronic time stamp also enjoys the presumption of the accuracy of the date and time it indicates and the integrity of the data to which they are bound. Note the wording: the presumption covers the date, the time and the integrity of the data from that point. It says nothing about what happened before.
The limit you have to say out loud
Sealing proves the file is unchanged since sealing. It does not prove the photo was unedited before it was sealed, it does not prove the scene was real, and it does not say who took the picture. If a tenant edits a photo and then sends it to you, sealing that file seals the edited version faithfully. This is why the moment of sealing matters more than the seal itself.
A workflow that keeps the gap small
- Seal the original file, not a screenshot, a chat-app copy or an export. Messaging apps often recompress images, which creates a different file.
- Seal on receipt, or on the day of the inspection if your own staff take the photos. The shorter the gap between capture and sealing, the less room for a challenge.
- Keep the sealed original in more than one place. The seal covers a fingerprint of the file, so if the file is lost, the fingerprint cannot rebuild it.
- Record who sent the file, when it arrived and how. That record, not the seal, speaks to where the photo came from.
- When a reviewer asks, send the verification link. They can check the timestamp and hash themselves.
Checking a later copy
The public validator checks the signature chain, the issuing certificate authority, certificate expiry and timestamp integrity of a signed PDF, and shows whether content was modified after signing. It takes signed PDFs, so for a photo the comparison runs through the sealed original and its verification link. If a copy of the image is disputed, the question becomes simple: does it match the sealed file, or not.
Back to the flooded flat
If the adjuster in our opening scene had sealed the tenant's photos the day they arrived, the reviewer's question would have had a precise answer. These files are unchanged since that timestamp, and here is the link to check it. The reviewer could still ask how the tenant took them, and the adjuster would still need the sender record. But the argument over whether somebody touched the files in the claim system would be over before it began.
Seal your next batch of claim photos on Swiss Trust Layer and send the verification link with the file.
