How Coventry's Public Image Archive Ended Up Full of Duplicates — and What's Being Done to Fix It

Coventry City Council's digital image holdings contain thousands of duplicate photographs — some files stored three or four times across separate internal servers — and a formal programme to identify and remove them has been quietly under way since early 2025. The scale of the problem, now better understood after an 18-month internal review, traces back to decisions made during the city's preparation for UK City of Culture 2021.

The duplication issue matters now because Coventry is mid-way through a broader push to digitise its civic archives and make them publicly searchable. The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum on Jordan Well launched an expanded online collections portal in March 2026, and officers have said the portal's usefulness depends directly on whether the underlying image library is clean, tagged correctly, and free of redundant files that confuse search results and inflate storage costs.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem stretch back to 2020. When Coventry was gearing up to host UK City of Culture, multiple teams — including Coventry City of Culture Trust, the council's communications directorate, and independent contractors commissioned to document regeneration work around Friargate and the city centre — were all capturing and uploading photographs simultaneously. There was no single agreed repository, and no shared naming convention. Images were deposited into at least four separate systems: the council's internal content management platform, a dedicated City of Culture media hub, the Herbert's collections database, and a commercial cloud folder maintained by an external PR agency.

By the time the City of Culture year ended in 2022, those collections had never been reconciled. Staff turnover across the communications and culture teams made the task harder. In 2023, when officers began migrating legacy files ahead of a server contract renewal, they discovered that certain landmark photographs — including multiple aerial shots of Coventry Cathedral on Priory Street and documentation images from the Canal Basin regeneration — existed in as many as six separate copies, sometimes with conflicting metadata or caption errors.

The council's IT procurement records, which are publicly available under its contract register, show the server consolidation work was procured in the financial year 2023-24 at a contract value that officers at the time described as running into six figures, though the precise final cost has not been published. Storage duplication was identified in that period as a contributing factor to unnecessary expenditure.

The Audit and What Comes Next

A structured deduplication programme formally began in January 2025, coordinated between the council's Digital Services team and archivists at the Herbert. The process uses automated matching software to flag probable duplicates, which are then reviewed manually before deletion. As of spring 2026, staff had reviewed more than 40,000 image records, according to a progress note tabled at a council scrutiny session in April 2026.

The Herbert's online portal, which went live with around 28,000 catalogue entries in March 2026, was specifically designed to sit on top of the cleaned data rather than the old combined archive. That means residents searching for historical images of Hillfields, Earlsdon or the Lower Precinct will increasingly find coherent, non-repeated results — though archivists have cautioned that the full back catalogue will take until at least late 2027 to process completely.

For anyone who has submitted photographs to the council's community history programmes — including the Coventry People's Archive project based at the Alan Berry Building on Gosford Street — the advice from digital services staff is to hold off on submitting new material until later this year, when updated submission guidelines are expected to be published. The new guidelines will include standardised file naming and metadata requirements designed to prevent the same duplication problems arising again.

The broader lesson, as Coventry's archivists have found it, is that the excitement of a high-profile cultural moment like City of Culture generated documentation activity without the administrative infrastructure to manage it. Getting that infrastructure right now, four years on, is slower and less glamorous work — but it is the work that determines whether the record of that year survives in any usable form.