How Hong Kong's Digital Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — and What It Took to Get Here

Hong Kong's public-facing digital estate is carrying a problem that has been building since at least 2018: tens of thousands of duplicate images stored, indexed, and served across dozens of government and quasi-government web properties, costing storage bandwidth and degrading search performance at a time when the city is competing hard to retain its status as Asia's premier digital business hub.

The issue came into sharper focus this year after the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer published updated web accessibility and content management guidelines in January 2026, requiring all bureaux and departments to audit visual assets on their public portals before the end of the third quarter. That deadline — 30 September 2026 — is now less than three months away, and technology managers at several departments are only beginning the remediation work.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots trace back to the mid-2010s, when Hong Kong's government accelerated its push onto mobile and social platforms without a centralised asset management system. The GovHK portal, which sits on servers managed through the Innovation and Technology Bureau's digital infrastructure contracts, grew through a series of department-by-department migrations. Each migration imported legacy image libraries wholesale, creating duplicate files with different filenames but identical or near-identical pixel content. The same stock photograph of the Central waterfront, for example, might exist under a dozen separate filenames across the Lands Department, the Tourism Commission microsite, and the Transport Department's public information pages.

The problem compounded after 2020. Several bureaux relaunched websites in the wake of government restructuring that followed the implementation of the National Security Law, and content managers — under pressure to refresh public-facing messaging quickly — uploaded assets without cross-checking existing libraries. The Hong Kong Tourism Board's revamped digital campaign infrastructure, headquartered near Wan Chai's Convention Avenue, and the Trade and Industry Department's SME support portals in Queensway Government Offices both expanded their image repositories significantly between 2021 and 2023.

Private-sector platforms feeding into the Greater Bay Area digital corridor added another layer. Companies integrating Hong Kong storefronts with Mainland Chinese content delivery networks often found that image files were duplicated automatically during cross-border synchronisation, a side effect of differing file-naming protocols on either side of the data boundary.

What the Numbers Show

A 2025 audit commissioned by the Hong Kong Productivity Council — whose offices are on Kowloon's Mong Kok Road — found that across a sample of 14 government department websites, approximately 34 percent of all hosted image files were exact or near-exact duplicates. The audit estimated that eliminating confirmed duplicates from those 14 sites alone could reduce storage overhead by roughly 1.2 terabytes and cut average page-load times by between 8 and 15 percent, depending on network conditions. Page performance matters commercially: the Hong Kong Internet Exchange, based in Tseung Kwan O's industrial park cluster, handles traffic volumes that put the city's web infrastructure under direct comparison with Singapore's equivalent systems.

Duplicate image replacement is not a simple delete-and-redirect operation. Each removed file requires a verified replacement reference — ensuring that the correct canonical image URL is embedded in every page that previously called the duplicate. Get it wrong and pages break. The technical overhead of doing this at scale across legacy content management systems, many of which run on platforms last updated in 2019 or earlier, explains why departments have been slow to act despite the January guidelines.

Organisations working toward the September deadline have two practical paths. The first is a full asset audit using automated image-matching tools, which can identify duplicates with high confidence but require human review before deletion. The second is a phased migration to a centralised digital asset management platform — an approach the Digital Policy Office has been piloting with three departments since March 2026. Either way, the window is short. Departments that miss the 30 September deadline face mandatory reporting to the Chief Secretary's Office under the January circular, and the audit findings will be factored into each bureau's annual digital performance review.