Lishui city in East China's Zhejiang province plans to invest more than 4 billion yuan ($617.3 million) to build an international digital image center, local media reported.

Plans are for the Lishui center to have a photography management platform, a government image resource-sharing platform, an area for VCG – a Chinese photo and media agency – and an industry library to promote the digitization and industrialization of image resources.

In addition, the archive will be included in a national image backup center that provides professional image storage services.

The new center will establish an image copyright transaction service center, to maximize the value of copyrights.

Focusing on the development frontier of the digital image industry – such as computational photography – Lishui reportedly hopes to become a magnet for photographic laboratories and research and development centers.

There are plans are for the city to work with leading digital image enterprises at home and abroad and build an online community for image sharing.