Hong Kong's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Singapore and London

Hong Kong's public records offices, university libraries and government digital archives are accelerating efforts to purge duplicate and misattributed images from their databases, a housekeeping challenge that has quietly grown into a significant data integrity issue across the city's institutions. The push comes as the volume of digitised visual material held by bodies such as the Hong Kong Public Records Office in Central and the Hong Kong University Libraries system has expanded sharply over the past three years.

The issue matters now for a specific reason: the city's financial hub ambitions depend partly on trusted data infrastructure. As Hong Kong competes with Singapore for regional headquarters status, its libraries, stock platforms and media organisations are under pressure to demonstrate that their image databases meet international standards for accuracy and provenance. Duplicate images — where the same photograph appears under multiple captions, dates or attribution tags — erode that trust, particularly when used in legal filings, academic research or financial prospectuses.

What Hong Kong Is Actually Doing

The Hong Kong Public Records Office, based on Phong Minh Road in Kwun Tong, launched an internal audit program in early 2025 targeting its digitised photographic collections, which run to hundreds of thousands of items covering the city's colonial and post-handover eras. The program uses perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical copies — to identify duplicates before human archivists review and consolidate records. The Government Records Service has not published a completion timeline for the audit.

Separately, Hong Kong Baptist University's Digital Humanities Initiative, based in Kowloon Tong, has been trialling automated duplicate detection across its oral history photograph archive since late 2025. The project is part of a broader push by local universities to align with metadata standards set by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, a global framework widely adopted since its formalisation in the 1990s. Staff there are also manually verifying images flagged by the algorithm before any record is altered or removed — a two-step process that slows throughput but reduces the risk of deleting genuinely distinct images that share compositional similarities.

Commercial platforms are moving faster. Getty Images, which maintains a significant licensing operation in Wan Chai, updated its duplicate-detection protocols in January 2026 as part of a global rollout, applying machine-learning tools that cross-reference new submissions against its existing library in near real time. The company has not disclosed the rejection rate for Hong Kong-sourced submissions specifically.

Singapore and London Are Setting the Pace

Singapore's National Archives launched its Automated Content Integrity System in mid-2024, integrating duplicate detection directly into its ingestion pipeline so that no new item enters the permanent collection without a duplication check. That system, built in partnership with Nanyang Technological University, processed more than 1.2 million image records in its first year of operation, according to figures the National Archives published in March 2026. The upfront investment in pipeline integration means Singapore's archivists spend considerably less time on retrospective cleanup than their Hong Kong counterparts currently do.

London's British Library completed a three-year retrospective duplicate audit of its digitised newspaper photograph archive in December 2025, removing or consolidating roughly 47,000 duplicate records from a collection of approximately 4 million images, according to the Library's annual report published in February 2026. The Library used a combination of open-source perceptual hashing tools and commercial optical character recognition software to match captions as well as images.

Hong Kong's archivists are watching both models closely. The city's institutions have the technical capacity to replicate Singapore's pipeline approach but face a more fragmented landscape: responsibility for image records is spread across the Government Records Service, the public libraries network under the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, and dozens of individual university and museum collections that operate independently.

Organisations holding image archives should begin with a file-level duplicate audit using freely available perceptual hashing tools before committing to expensive commercial platforms. Institutions that have not yet adopted Dublin Core metadata standards — or their successor frameworks — will find any automated system harder to implement and more prone to false positives. The Government Records Service has indicated it plans to publish updated digitisation guidelines later in 2026, which should give smaller cultural organisations a clearer roadmap to follow.