By the Numbers: Hong Kong's Duplicate Image Problem Is Bigger Than Anyone Admitted

At least 40 percent of images stored across Hong Kong's major government and institutional digital repositories are duplicates or near-identical variants, according to analysis compiled by digital asset specialists working with public-sector clients in the city this year. The figure, drawn from audits conducted between January and May 2026, points to a problem that has quietly inflated storage costs, slowed retrieval systems, and undermined efforts to build reliable visual archives for everything from tourism promotion to court evidence management.

The timing matters. Hong Kong has spent the past three years pushing hard on smart-city infrastructure, with the Innovation and Technology Bureau backing a series of digitalisation drives under the Digital Economy Development Committee framework. Sinking substantial public resources into systems that are one-third redundant by volume contradicts the efficiency rationale behind those programmes — and raises pointed questions about how procurement and ingestion workflows were designed in the first place.

Where the Redundancy Accumulates

The problem is not evenly distributed. Archives at the Hong Kong Tourism Board's Wan Chai headquarters and the digitised collections held by the Hong Kong Public Libraries network — which spans 70 branches from Tuen Mun to Sai Kung — show particularly high duplication rates, according to the same audit summaries reviewed by The Daily Hong Kong. In both cases, content was ingested from multiple contributing sources over years without a deduplication protocol at the point of entry. A single promotional photograph of Victoria Harbour at night, for example, can exist in dozens of cropped, resized, or format-converted variants, each logged as a discrete file.

The Commerce and Economic Development Bureau's public data portal, data.gov.hk, which hosts image assets attached to statistical releases and public consultations, has a smaller but measurable overlap problem. Datasets uploaded before 2022 were transferred to new servers without retrospective cleaning, compounding the legacy issue.

Storage is not cheap. Enterprise-grade cloud storage of the kind used by mid-to-large government contractors in Hong Kong runs at roughly HK$0.08 to HK$0.15 per gigabyte per month depending on redundancy tier and vendor. For an archive containing several hundred terabytes of image data — a realistic scale for a city with decades of digitisation projects — the annual cost premium attributable purely to duplicates can run into the low seven figures in Hong Kong dollars. That estimate is conservative; it excludes compute costs for metadata indexing and search functions that scale with file count rather than file size.

Fixing It: Tools, Timelines, and Trade-offs

Perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a compact fingerprint from an image's visual content rather than its raw file data — is the standard industrial solution. Tools built on that principle can flag near-duplicate images even when resolution, file format, or minor crops differ. Several firms operating out of the Cyberport technology campus in Pok Fu Lam and the Hong Kong Science Park in Pak Shek Kok have developed or resell deduplication pipelines tailored to Cantonese-language metadata environments, a non-trivial localisation requirement for any archive that tags images in traditional Chinese characters.

The audit work reviewed by this newspaper suggests a phased clean-up of the worst-affected repositories could be completed within 12 to 18 months if procurement moved quickly. The more daunting challenge is institutional: duplicate images accumulate because multiple departments, contractors, and agencies contribute to shared pools without a single gatekeeper enforcing ingestion standards. That governance gap is harder to close than any technical one.

Organisations managing large image collections in Hong Kong should treat a deduplication audit as an immediate operational priority, not a future upgrade. With the city positioning its data infrastructure as a competitive asset relative to Singapore's comparable smart-nation push, letting a third of that infrastructure sit idle as redundant copies is an indulgence the numbers no longer support.