'My gran's face has been replaced by a stranger': Coventry residents speak out over photo duplication errors in council history project

A Coventry city council-backed digital heritage project has wrongly replaced hundreds of resident-submitted photographs with duplicate images drawn from a shared stock database, according to multiple community members who say they discovered the errors only after the archive went public online last month.

The project, delivered through the Coventry History Centre on Bayley Lane and in partnership with the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, was designed to build a publicly accessible digital record of neighbourhood life spanning the past century. Participants from areas including Foleshill, Hillfields and Stoke Aldermoor submitted personal family photographs — many irreplaceable originals that were then scanned and returned. The problem emerged when the searchable online portal launched in June 2026: multiple users reported that their uploaded images had been swapped, duplicated or overwritten by visually similar photographs from other contributors or from a generic image library used to fill metadata gaps.

One Foleshill resident, who has been part of a local history group connected to the Coventry Pakistani Community Centre on Beake Avenue for more than a decade, said she found a photograph of an unrecognised woman labelled with her grandmother's name and birth year. She described the discovery as distressing, saying the image her family submitted — taken at a wedding in 1971 — had simply vanished from the record. Several members of her community group reported near-identical experiences when they checked their own entries.

Scope of the problem grows as more residents check their entries

The Hillfields History Group, which operates out of the Hillfields Community Resource Centre on Primrose Hill Street, said at least 34 submissions from its members appeared to show image duplication errors as of early July. A retired schoolteacher who contributed photographs of the former Courtaulds textile works on Foleshill Road — demolished in stages from the late 1980s onwards — said three of his five submitted images had been replaced by near-identical industrial photographs that bore no relationship to his family's documented history at that site.

The scale of the issue is significant for an archive that, according to its published project documentation, aimed to digitise and catalogue more than 4,000 community-sourced images from across Coventry's 18 electoral wards. Community members have raised concerns not only about the technical failures but about the process for raising complaints: several described submitting correction requests through the archive portal only to receive automated responses with no clear resolution timeline.

Coventry City Council's cultural services directorate, which part-funded the initiative alongside a heritage grant, had not issued a public statement on the errors as of the time this article was filed. The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, as the named delivery partner, confirmed it was aware of concerns and was reviewing submissions, though no specific remediation date had been communicated to affected residents as of 4 July 2026.

What affected residents are being advised to do

Community groups in Foleshill and Hillfields are circulating informal guidance urging residents who submitted photographs to the project before the June launch to log into the archive portal and cross-check their entries now, before any further system updates potentially overwrite the current error state. The Hillfields Community Resource Centre has set up a drop-in session for Tuesdays and Thursdays between 10am and 1pm where volunteers are helping residents document discrepancies with screenshots and written records.

Heritage advisers with experience of similar digitisation projects elsewhere in the West Midlands have previously recommended that any resident who can demonstrate an original submission — through a dated email confirmation, a physical receipt from a scanning session, or a retained copy of the original photograph — preserve that evidence carefully, as it forms the basis of any formal correction request to an archive operator.

For Coventry families who entrusted personal and often singular images to a public institution, the practical question now is whether those photographs can be recovered and correctly reattributed. The archive remains accessible online while the review is ongoing. Anyone who believes their submission has been affected is being directed to contact the Coventry History Centre directly at its Bayley Lane premises, where staff are reportedly logging individual cases ahead of a formal response from the council's cultural services team.