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

Hong Kong organisations are sitting on millions of duplicate digital images — and the bill for storing them is quietly compounding. Across government departments, media archives, property portals, and corporate databases, data management specialists estimate that duplicate files can account for anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of total image storage in unmanaged repositories, a problem that becomes more acute as organisations migrate legacy systems to cloud infrastructure without first auditing what they are moving.

The timing matters because 2026 marks the midpoint of the Hong Kong government's Smart City Blueprint 2.0, a framework that set digitalisation benchmarks across 70 public services. As agencies push to consolidate records onto shared platforms — including the centralised GovCloud infrastructure managed under the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer on Queensway — redundant data is arriving in bulk, inflating costs and complicating retrieval systems that depend on clean, deduplicated file structures.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Cloud storage pricing gives the problem a concrete shape. Enterprise-tier object storage in Hong Kong data centres — facilities run by operators in Tseung Kwan O's data centre corridor and in Kwai Chung industrial blocks — typically runs between HK$0.18 and HK$0.25 per gigabyte per month for standard-access tiers, according to published rate cards from regional providers. A single mid-sized property agency managing listings photographs across 18 districts can accumulate upward of 40 terabytes of image files annually, and industry benchmarks from digital asset management vendors suggest 35 to 45 percent of those files are exact or near-exact duplicates created through repeated uploads, format conversions, and thumbnail generation.

At HK$0.20 per gigabyte per month, 15 terabytes of redundant images costs roughly HK$36,000 a year — before factoring in egress fees, backup replication, and the staff time required to search through bloated catalogues. Multiply that across the dozens of mid-to-large property agencies operating on platforms listed under the Estate Agents Authority, and the sector-wide waste runs into the millions annually.

The problem is not confined to real estate. The Hong Kong Public Libraries system, which operates 70 branch locations including the flagship Central Library on Causeway Bay's Moreton Terrace, has been digitising historical photographic collections since 2018. A public procurement document from the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, published on the Government Logistics Department's GovHK tender portal in March 2025, referenced deduplication requirements as a mandatory deliverable in a digital asset management contract valued at HK$4.2 million — a detail that signals how seriously at least one public body is taking the issue.

Why Deduplication Is Harder Here

Hong Kong's compressed geography and high business density mean that many organisations — law firms in Central, insurance groups in Wan Chai, logistics operators in Kwun Tong — maintain overlapping image libraries sourced from shared vendors, stock agencies, and internal teams, with no single department owning the cleanup mandate. When the same corporate headshot or product photograph enters three different business units' SharePoint folders and two different cloud backup buckets, standard file-size audits miss the duplication unless perceptual hashing tools are deployed.

Perceptual hashing compares images by visual content rather than file name or size, catching near-duplicates that have been cropped, recompressed, or watermarked differently. The technology has been commercially available for years but adoption among Hong Kong's small and medium enterprises remains uneven. A 2024 survey by the Hong Kong Productivity Council found that fewer than one in five SMEs had a formal data lifecycle policy covering image assets specifically.

Organisations looking to benchmark their own exposure should start with a storage audit scoped to image file types — JPEG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC — across all active and backup repositories before any further cloud migration is signed off. The OGCIO publishes a Digital Government Blueprint reference architecture that includes data deduplication as a recommended practice at the infrastructure layer. Following that guidance, and running a perceptual hash audit before the next contract renewal cycle, is the most direct path to recovering measurable budget from a problem that has, until now, mostly gone uncounted.