Coventry Council's Digital Archive Overhaul Hits New Milestone This Week as Duplicate Image Problem Gets Tackled Head-On

Coventry City Council's digital records team confirmed this week that it has completed the first full audit of duplicated images stored across its public-facing planning and heritage portals — a problem that had been quietly accumulating for years and was costing both storage budget and staff hours. The audit, which covered assets held on the council's Planning Portal and the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum's digital collection system, found thousands of duplicated image files that had been uploaded multiple times without automated detection.

The issue matters now because the council is mid-way through a broader digitisation programme tied to the Coventry 2030 Local Plan. As more planning applications move online and residents increasingly consult digital heritage records — particularly those linked to the city's UNESCO City of Culture legacy sites — the integrity of the image library underpins how quickly case officers and members of the public can access accurate documents. Duplicate records slow search responses, create version-control confusion and inflate cloud storage costs that ultimately fall on the council's ICT budget.

What the Audit Found Across Two Key Sites

The audit covered two principal repositories. The first is the council's Planning Portal, which handles applications across wards including Radford, Foleshill and Cheylesmore, and which has seen a sharp rise in submissions since the council moved to a fully digital-first intake process in January 2025. The second is the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum on Jordan Well, whose digital catalogue runs to tens of thousands of items spanning the city's post-war reconstruction period — a collection of particular sensitivity given its use by schools, researchers and planning officers assessing heritage impact.

At the Herbert, staff identified a batch of duplicated photographic records relating to the Upper Precinct and Broadgate redevelopment imagery from the 1950s and 1960s — some files had been uploaded as many as four separate times under different metadata tags. At the Planning Portal, duplicate images attached to refused and resubmitted applications in the Hillfields and Earlsdon areas accounted for a disproportionate share of the problem, largely because applicants resubmitting revised plans were uploading full image sets rather than replacing individual files.

The council's ICT partnership with Civica — which supplies the back-end document management software used by several West Midlands local authorities — is providing a deduplication tool that has already been deployed in pilot form on the planning system. According to publicly available procurement documents, the contract with Civica covering this software tier runs through to March 2028.

What Happens Next for Residents and Applicants

From Monday 6 July, anyone submitting a new planning application through the Coventry portal will encounter an updated image upload interface that flags likely duplicates before submission is completed. The council has published guidance on its website advising applicants to use JPEG or PNG files under 5MB per image and to label files with a consistent naming convention — changes that case officers say should reduce the manual triage work that currently delays some applications by several working days.

For heritage researchers using the Herbert's online catalogue, the deduplication work means cleaner search results when browsing the post-war Coventry collection. The Herbert's digitisation team is working through the backlog in phases, with the 1940–1970 photographic holdings — the period covering the reconstruction of the city centre following the November 1940 Blitz — scheduled for completion by the end of September 2026.

Community groups that contribute to Coventry's local archive — including those working with the Coventry History Centre on Mandela Avenue — have been advised to hold off uploading new batches of donated images until the deduplication protocols are formally embedded across all three platforms, expected by late August. The council has set up a dedicated inbox for organisations waiting to submit material, to ensure no collections are lost in the transition.

The broader lesson for the city is straightforward: a digital archive is only as useful as its housekeeping. Getting this right before the Local Plan enters its examination stage — currently scheduled for early 2027 — will matter when inspectors start pulling up site photographs as evidence.