Hong Kong Moves to Tackle Duplicate Image Problem in Its Digital Archives — but Is It Doing Enough?

Hong Kong's public digital archives contain tens of thousands of duplicate images — photographs, scanned documents and government-issued visual records stored multiple times across different systems — and the city's institutions are only beginning to grapple with the cost and confusion that creates. The Hong Kong Public Records Office, based in the Government Records Service building on Wo Yi Hop Road in Kwai Chung, began a phased digitisation review in early 2025, and internal assessments have flagged duplicate-image proliferation as a priority problem. No official figure for the total number of affected files has been published.

The issue matters now for a specific reason: as Hong Kong pitches itself as a regional data and fintech hub in competition with Singapore, the integrity of institutional digital assets — property records, licensing photographs, heritage images — has become a boardroom and policy concern, not just an archival one. Duplicate images inflate storage costs, confuse automated search systems, and create legal ambiguity when multiple versions of the same official document image carry different metadata or timestamps. For a city that processed more than 90,000 land registry search requests in a single recent quarter, according to the Land Registry's published statistics, that ambiguity has real-world consequences.

What Hong Kong's Institutions Are Actually Doing

The most active local effort is running through the Hong Kong Heritage Museum in Sha Tin, which has been working with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department to apply perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical copies — to its digitised collection. The museum's digital team began piloting the process in late 2024 across a subset of roughly 12,000 items in its visual arts holdings. Perceptual hashing is not new technology; the question has always been institutional will and budget allocation to run it at scale.

The Hong Kong Public Libraries network, which manages digital collections across more than 70 branches, relies on a vendor-managed content management system that does not automatically deduplicate image files. Staff at the City Hall Public Library on Edinburgh Place in Central have flagged the issue in written submissions to LCSD going back to at least 2023, though those submissions are internal documents not publicly released. Duplicates accumulate particularly fast when multiple departments upload the same event photographs through different portals after government functions.

Singapore's National Library Board adopted an automated deduplication protocol for its digital repository, the National Digital Library, in 2022, and has publicly described the process as cutting redundant storage load by a measurable margin in its digital infrastructure. London's Victoria and Albert Museum similarly integrated duplicate detection into its collections management system during a 2021–2023 infrastructure overhaul. Both cities moved faster than Hong Kong partly because they committed dedicated budget lines to the work. Hong Kong's equivalent institutions have tended to treat deduplication as a secondary task folded into broader IT upgrade cycles rather than a standalone programme with its own resourcing.

The Practical Stakes for Users and Business

For property lawyers working the Mid-Levels corridor or architects pulling licensed heritage images for Central district redevelopment applications, duplicate records create a specific headache: it is not always clear which version of a scanned plan or survey photograph is the authoritative one. The Land Registry has its own image verification protocols and maintains that its official scanned title documents are subject to quality control, but third-party platforms that republish or aggregate those images do not always carry the same controls.

The cost of doing nothing is not abstract. Cloud storage is cheap per gigabyte, but at institutional scale — and when duplicates number in the hundreds of thousands rather than the thousands — the overhead compounds. More critically, AI-powered search and retrieval tools that Hong Kong's Smart City Blueprint 2.0 envisions deploying across government services perform less accurately when they are trained or queried against datasets riddled with near-identical duplicates carrying inconsistent tags.

Organisations managing digital image collections in Hong Kong should, at minimum, audit whether their current content management systems include any deduplication layer and, if not, schedule a vendor conversation before the next budget cycle closes at the end of the 2026–27 financial year. For the city's major public institutions, the window to get ahead of this problem — rather than react to it — is narrowing.