Hong Kong's War on Duplicate Images: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Hong Kong's digital regulators and technology sector figures are converging on an uncomfortable consensus: the city's public and commercial databases are clogged with duplicate image files, and the bill — in storage costs, processing time and data-integrity failures — is no longer trivial. The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer has been quietly pressing departments to audit their visual asset holdings since a 2025 circular directed bureaux to reduce redundant data ahead of the government's broader cloud-migration programme, due for a significant expansion phase in late 2026.

The timing matters. Hong Kong is spending heavily to keep pace with Singapore as a regional data and fintech hub. Every megabyte of duplicated imagery sitting on government servers in Wan Chai and Kowloon Bay is a liability, not just a housekeeping embarrassment. Procurement rules updated under the 2024 Digital Economy Development Committee framework now tie departmental IT budgets partly to efficiency metrics — meaning agencies that fail to clean up redundant assets face harder conversations at the Finance Committee in the Legislative Council.

The Scale of the Problem

Experts working with the Hong Kong Productivity Council, which operates its digital transformation unit out of the HKPC Building on Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong, describe the duplicate-image problem as systemic rather than isolated. The issue emerges at every layer: government press offices uploading the same headshots multiple times across departmental portals, Lands Department aerial surveys storing near-identical frames from overlapping flight paths, and hospital-system radiology archives holding duplicates generated when legacy software failed to flag repeat uploads.

On the commercial side, the picture is no tidier. E-commerce operators clustered in industrial units around Kwun Tong Road and the Landmark East complex in Kwun Tong have flagged that product catalogues routinely carry three to five versions of the same item photograph — different file sizes, slightly adjusted crops — because marketplaces in both Hong Kong and on the mainland require separate upload specifications. Those operators say the manual effort of managing those libraries, without automated deduplication tools, costs small and medium-sized businesses meaningful hours every week.

The Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute, better known as ASTRI and based in the Hong Kong Science Park in Pak Shek Kok, has been developing hash-based deduplication protocols suited to the dual-language, dual-platform environment that Hong Kong businesses operate in. The institute presented findings at an industry briefing in May 2026 indicating that organisations adopting automated perceptual-hash screening reduced their image storage overhead by a measurable margin, though ASTRI has not yet published a finalised figure in a public document.

What the Key Voices Are Saying

Those close to the government's cloud programme describe the OGCIO position as pragmatic: departments are not being ordered to delete anything without human review, but are expected to implement flagging systems so duplicate images surface for a decision. The concern, expressed by technology lawyers at firms on Connaught Road Central, is that over-aggressive automated deletion could create problems under the Evidence Ordinance if images later become relevant to legal proceedings.

The Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation, which handles domain and digital infrastructure policy, has pointed to international benchmarks when advising local operators. Industry observers note that content delivery networks used by Hong Kong publishers serving both local and Greater Bay Area audiences have an especially acute version of this problem: images cached and re-uploaded across nodes in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong can multiply without any human intervention.

For businesses, the practical advice from IT consultants active in the Central and Western District startup ecosystem is to begin with a one-time audit using open-source perceptual hashing tools before investing in enterprise solutions. For government departments, the OGCIO circular from 2025 already provides a compliance checklist. The next formal review of departmental progress is expected at the Digital Policy Office steering committee session scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026 — giving organisations roughly six months to show measurable progress before the findings feed into the following year's budget cycle.