Coventry Council Moves to Fix Thousands of Duplicate and Broken Images Across City's Digital Estate

Coventry City Council confirmed this week that a rolling programme to identify and replace duplicate and broken images across its public-facing digital systems has entered a critical phase, with technical teams working through a backlog of affected records in the planning portal, the local heritage archive, and the city's main resident services hub at Manor House.

The issue came to a head after staff at the Coventry Archives and Research Centre on Mandela Avenue flagged repeated problems with image duplication in the digitised collections uploaded since January 2025. Duplicate files were clogging search results, slowing load times and, in some cases, replacing correctly labelled historical photographs with unrelated images — meaning members of the public searching planning histories for streets such as Far Gosford Street or Spon Street were pulling up the wrong documents entirely.

The problem is not unique to Coventry, but the scale matters locally. The city's planning portal handles more than 3,000 active applications at any given point, according to figures the council has previously published in its digital services reports. When images are mislabelled or duplicated, validation checks fail and applicants can face delays that run into weeks — a real pressure point given the ongoing regeneration work around Friargate and the development pipeline in Foleshill.

What the Audit Found This Week

Between Monday 29 June and Friday 3 July, the council's ICT and digital services team ran a structured audit across three systems: the Talis planning document manager, the resident-facing MyCoventry portal, and the heritage image database maintained jointly with Coventry University's Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities. The audit identified image duplication rates running significantly higher in records uploaded via bulk migration than in those submitted individually by applicants or archivists.

Bulk migration — the process of transferring large volumes of files from legacy systems — was used extensively during the council's 2023 digital transformation programme, which carried a published budget of £4.2 million. Officers believe the duplication stems partly from a metadata mismatch during that migration, where files were assigned identical reference tags, causing the system to import them multiple times rather than treating them as distinct records.

Practically, this has meant that some planning applications submitted for properties in the Hillfields area and around Stoney Stanton Road have shown the wrong site photographs in the public register — an error that, if undetected, could complicate neighbour consultations or appeal proceedings. The council's planning committee meets next on 15 July, and officers are working to clear the highest-priority cases before that date.

The Fix and What Comes Next

Coventry's digital team is using a combination of automated de-duplication scripts and manual review. Files are being checked against a master registry before being reinstated with corrected metadata. The council's Friargate offices are coordinating the effort, with a dedicated inbox open for residents and agents who believe their applications may have been affected.

Heritage records held at the Mandela Avenue archive are being treated separately, given their sensitivity. Coventry's archive holds more than 200,000 digitised images, including the Coventry Blitz photographic record and the city's post-war reconstruction survey. Staff there have been asked to flag any image where the title, date or location appears inconsistent with the visual content, so those records can be reviewed manually rather than processed by the automated script.

For residents and planning agents, the practical advice from the council is straightforward: check any application submitted or updated since January 2025 on the public planning portal to confirm the correct site images are displayed. If something looks wrong, report it directly via the planning department contact form rather than waiting for the system to self-correct. The council has indicated it expects the bulk of duplicates to be resolved before the end of July, though complex cases involving multiple bulk-migrated documents may take longer.

The wider context matters too. Coventry is not the only local authority grappling with the legacy of rushed digital migration, but the city's ambitious regeneration programme — stretching from the city centre to Foleshill and beyond — means that accurate, accessible public records are not simply an administrative nicety. They are the paper trail on which planning decisions, heritage protections and community consultations depend.