How Los Angeles Is Tackling Duplicate Image Replacement in Public Records — and How It Stacks Up Against Rival Cities

Los Angeles city archivists have flagged a growing problem buried inside the massive digitization push tied to the 2028 Olympic infrastructure buildout: thousands of duplicate images — scanned maps, construction permits, environmental-impact photographs — are clogging the city's document management systems, slowing down processing times for permit applications across neighborhoods like Boyle Heights and Koreatown where Olympic-adjacent development is moving fast.

The issue landed on the agenda of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning's digital services unit earlier this year, as the city races to clear a backlog of building permits and land-use documents before Olympic construction deadlines tighten. Duplicate image files — some created by redundant scanning runs, others uploaded multiple times through legacy software — have been identified as a drag on retrieval times and storage costs inside the city's enterprise content management platform.

What LA Is Doing About It

The city is now piloting an automated duplicate-detection tool across two municipal repositories: the Bureau of Engineering's project archive on South Figueroa Street downtown, and the Planning Department's permit imaging system, which serves counters at the Figueroa Plaza office complex near Civic Center. The pilot, which began in March 2026, uses perceptual hashing — a technique that compares image fingerprints rather than file names — to flag near-identical scans for review before deletion. According to the city's IT procurement documents reviewed for this story, the contract for the software runs through December 2026 and is valued at under $500,000.

The pressure to get this right is real. The Bureau of Engineering alone processes tens of thousands of scanned plan sheets per month in connection with projects tied to Olympic venue corridors, including the Crenshaw/LAX transit line extensions and road improvements near SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Storing redundant copies of large-format engineering drawings inflates both cloud storage bills and the time staff spend sorting legitimate document versions from duplicates.

Ken Bernstein's urban design division within the Planning Department has separately flagged that duplicate aerial and street-level photographs are complicating historic preservation reviews in neighborhoods like Leimert Park, where Olympic visitor infrastructure is bumping up against protected cultural sites.

How LA Compares to London, Tokyo, and São Paulo

Other cities managing large Olympic or infrastructure legacies have faced the same headache. London's Planning Inspectorate began a deduplication project for its digital infrastructure archive in 2022, three years after the city finished processing documents from the 2012 Games legacy build. Tokyo's metropolitan government dealt with a version of this problem inside its 2020 Olympic permitting archive, ultimately writing off an estimated 18 percent of stored scanned files as redundant, according to reporting by the Nikkei Shimbun. São Paulo, which is preparing its own major infrastructure push ahead of a possible 2034 World Cup bid, has not yet addressed the issue at scale — a gap that urban data consultants have noted publicly.

Los Angeles, by contrast, is moving on the problem before the Games rather than after. That timing matters. A city that waits until 2029 to clean its document archive faces the compounded cost of years of inflated storage and the harder job of deduplicating a larger, more tangled dataset. New York City's Department of Buildings, for reference, is still working through a deduplication backlog in its DOB NOW system stemming from a 2019 software migration — seven years on, the agency still lists duplicate-record remediation as an open project in its IT roadmap published this spring.

For Angelenos navigating the permit process — contractors pulling construction licenses in Sylmar, property owners filing variance applications in Eagle Rock — the practical payoff is faster document retrieval and fewer cases where city staff pull the wrong version of a plan set. The Planning Department has said it expects the pilot results to inform a citywide rollout decision by early 2027, which would coincide with the peak of Olympic construction activity. If the March-to-December pilot demonstrates meaningful reductions in retrieval time and storage cost, the city will be in an unusually strong position compared to its peer Olympic hosts — cities that largely treated deduplication as an afterthought rather than an infrastructure priority.