LA Leads U.S. Cities on Duplicate Image Replacement, But London and Tokyo Are Moving Faster

Los Angeles city agencies have replaced or retired more than 340,000 duplicate digital images across municipal databases since January 2025, according to figures compiled by the city's Bureau of Information Technology Services — but that number, while large, trails comparable efforts in London and Tokyo, where centralized digital governance programs have been running longer and with deeper funding commitments.

The issue matters more now than it did even two years ago. With the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games locked in for venues from Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park, city agencies are under pressure to ensure that public-facing digital infrastructure — wayfinding apps, permitting portals, emergency management platforms — is clean, accurate, and free of the redundant legacy imagery that accumulates in systems over decades. Duplicated images slow load times, create mapping errors, and in some cases have fed incorrect visual data into AI-assisted city planning tools.

The Los Angeles County Office of Digital Innovation, which coordinates with GeoHub — the city's open data mapping platform based in Downtown LA — began a formal duplicate image audit in the fall of 2024. The effort focuses primarily on asset management systems used by the Department of Public Works and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, both of which rely on geotagged street-level photography for infrastructure inspections and traffic signal maintenance. The audit covers roughly 4.2 million individual image records.

What Other Cities Are Doing

London's equivalent program, run through the Greater London Authority's Smart London Board, launched in 2022 and has since processed an estimated 11 million image records across Transport for London and borough-level planning databases. Tokyo's Bureau of Urban Development began a parallel initiative ahead of the 2021 Summer Olympics and has used automated hash-matching software — which identifies pixel-identical or near-identical duplicates — to reduce its imagery library by approximately 28 percent since 2020. Neither figure has been independently verified by The Daily Los Angeles, but both have been cited in published municipal reports.

Chicago's Department of Technology and Innovation completed a similar audit of its 311 service-request image archives in March 2026, eliminating redundant records from its 2.1 million-image backlog. New York City's Office of Technology and Innovation is still mid-process, having begun work on its own consolidation effort only in late 2025.

Back in Los Angeles, the practical consequences of unresolved duplication have shown up in specific neighborhoods. In Boyle Heights, field crews with the Bureau of Street Services found in a 2025 internal review that roughly one in six street-lamp inspection photos in the city's asset management system was a duplicate of an earlier upload, meaning some poles appeared to have been inspected twice when they hadn't been. A similar problem affected pothole-reporting imagery in the Mid-Wilshire corridor.

What Comes Next

The city expects to complete phase one of the GeoHub audit — covering street-level infrastructure imagery — by December 2026. Phase two, which will address duplicates in the permitting and building and safety photo archives maintained by the Department of Building and Safety on Figueroa Street downtown, is scheduled to begin in early 2027. That phase is projected to cover an additional 1.8 million records.

For residents, the immediate practical effect is likely to be modest but real: faster load times on the City's 311 LA app, more accurate street-condition data in tools like StreetsLA's public-facing repair tracker, and fewer errors in the digital twins — 3D city models — that planners are building to support Olympic venue logistics. The Bureau of Information Technology Services has indicated it is evaluating hash-matching software similar to what Tokyo deployed, though no contract has been awarded as of July 4, 2026.

The comparison with London and Tokyo is instructive less as a rebuke than as a timeline. Both cities had a major international event as a forcing function for digital housekeeping. Los Angeles now has the same forcing function, and two years to make use of it.