Coventry Council's Digital Image Archive Overhaul: What Happened This Week

Coventry City Council's digital communications team confirmed this week that a formal duplicate image replacement programme has begun across its public-facing web platforms, targeting thousands of redundant and mis-labelled photographs that have cluttered the authority's online presence for years. The work, centred on the council's main website portal and the CoventryConnect resident services hub, is the most significant digital housekeeping exercise the authority has undertaken since migrating its content management system in early 2024.

The timing matters. Coventry's council website handles an estimated 1.2 million unique visits per year, according to figures the authority published in its 2025 Digital Services Annual Review. Outdated images — including photographs of buildings since demolished, road layouts altered by the city centre regeneration works around Upper Well Street, and staff portraits of officers who left years ago — have drawn repeated complaints from residents and accessibility auditors alike. A review commissioned internally flagged over 4,300 duplicate or deprecated image files sitting in the live content library as of March 2026.

What the Programme Involves

The replacement work is split into two phases. Phase one, which began on Monday 29 June, covers static pages on the main council site — planning, parking, and waste collection sections that see the heaviest traffic. A team of three in-house digital officers, working from the council's offices at Friargate, is cross-referencing existing images against a newly built asset register before swapping in updated photographs approved for accessibility and copyright compliance.

Phase two is scheduled to begin in September and will address the CoventryConnect portal, which integrates with services run by Coventry City Council alongside partners including Coventry City Centre BID and the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership. That phase is expected to involve significantly more files, given the portal aggregates content from multiple contributing organisations across the city. Community boards in Foleshill and Tile Hill have already flagged to ward councillors that images used to represent local parks and facilities in those areas are badly out of date — some dating to before the 2021 City of Culture programme.

The council is using open-source digital asset management software for the audit, rather than procuring a specialist external system, a decision that kept setup costs below £8,000 according to a procurement notice published on the authority's contracts register in May 2026. External consultancy was ruled out after quotes from two suppliers came in above the £25,000 threshold that would have triggered a full procurement process.

Why Residents and Businesses Should Pay Attention

Duplicate and stale images are not merely cosmetic. Under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, local authorities are legally required to ensure all published images carry accurate alternative text descriptions. When an image is duplicated across multiple pages under different file names, those alt-text tags frequently diverge or go missing entirely — a compliance failure that can expose the council to challenge. Coventry's most recent accessibility audit, carried out by an external firm in autumn 2025, identified 214 individual image-related accessibility failures across the council's web estate.

For businesses operating in the Coventry city centre — particularly those near the newly regenerated sections of the Burges and around Broadgate — accurate council imagery also has practical consequences. Planning application portals and neighbourhood profile pages that display obsolete street-level photographs have caused confusion for developers and residents trying to assess planning context for neighbouring sites, according to concerns raised at a recent planning committee meeting.

The council has not published a full completion date for the entire programme, but the phase one work on core static pages is expected to wrap up before the end of July. Residents who spot images they believe are out of date or incorrectly labelled on the council's platforms can report them through the CoventryConnect feedback form, which the digital team says it is actively monitoring throughout the summer. Anyone with accessibility concerns about specific pages can also contact the council's web team directly via the contact details listed on its accessibility statement page, last updated in January 2026.