Los Angeles Leads Push to Purge Duplicate Digital Images From City Archives — But Other Global Cities Are Catching Up Fast

Los Angeles city archivists and technology contractors are deep into a systematic overhaul of the municipal digital image library — a sprawling collection of hundreds of thousands of photographs accumulated across departments ranging from the Department of Public Works to LA Metro — targeting the duplicate image problem that has quietly ballooned since agencies went fully digital after 2015. The effort, anchored partly by the 2028 Olympic Games preparation timeline, puts the city ahead of several American peers but still behind a handful of European counterparts who moved earlier and more aggressively.

The stakes are higher than they might appear. With the city's public-facing infrastructure under scrutiny from international Olympic committees, media partners, and billions of dollars in potential tourism revenue, outdated or redundant images of venues, neighborhoods, and landmarks carry real reputational risk. A photograph of the old Sixth Street Viaduct appearing in an official city tourism brochure alongside the current Sixth Street Bridge — which opened in July 2022 — is the kind of error that became a recurring embarrassment before the audit began. The broader Olympic media machine is expected to draw on LA's official image repositories directly, making the cleanup urgent.

How Los Angeles Is Tackling the Problem

The city's Bureau of Engineering and the Information Technology Agency have partnered with a deduplication software vendor to run automated hash-matching and perceptual similarity algorithms across the consolidated image database. The project, which sources familiar with the process say began in earnest in early 2025, targets repositories held by at least seven separate city departments. LA County's own system, managed separately out of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration on Grand Avenue, is running a parallel but uncoordinated effort — a gap that digital records managers have flagged internally as a coordination problem.

The Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, headquartered in Hollywood, has its own commercial image library through a licensing arrangement with Getty Images, and that collection undergoes quarterly culling. But the municipal government's own holdings — used for planning documents, permits, environmental impact reports, and public communications — had no systematic deduplication process for years. Estimates within city IT circles, though not officially published, put the redundancy rate at somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of stored images, a figure consistent with findings published by the Digital Preservation Coalition in its 2023 benchmark report on municipal digital collections globally.

Where LA Stands Against London, Singapore, and Tokyo

London's Government Digital Service embedded automated image deduplication into its central content management system as far back as 2019, meaning that by the time the pandemic hit and virtual tours of places like the South Bank and Tower Bridge surged in demand, the city's digital asset library was already clean. Singapore's Smart Nation initiative, launched under a national framework in 2014, treated image metadata hygiene as a baseline infrastructure requirement, not an afterthought. Tokyo, ahead of its 2021 Olympics, conducted a city-wide digital asset audit in 2019 that reportedly reduced its official image holdings by nearly a quarter, according to reporting by the Japan Times at the time.

By contrast, comparable American cities have moved more slowly. Philadelphia and Washington DC — both dealing with canceled Fourth of July events this year due to record heat — have no publicly disclosed deduplication programs for municipal imagery. Chicago's Department of Fleet and Facility Management began a limited pilot in 2024 focused only on infrastructure photographs. That makes LA's seven-department sweep look ambitious by domestic standards, even if European and Asian cities set the bar years earlier.

For Angelenos and the businesses that depend on city-issued permits, planning documents, and tourism assets, the practical result should be faster document processing and fewer errors in public-facing materials. Planners working on projects near Exposition Park and SoFi Stadium — two venues central to 2028 Olympic planning — have already reported receiving updated image sets with fewer conflicting or outdated site photographs attached to environmental review packets. The city's IT Agency has indicated the main deduplication pass is expected to complete before the end of 2026, leaving roughly 18 months to quality-check results before the Olympic torch arrives.