'My grandmother's face was replaced with a stranger's': Liverpool residents speak out on duplicate image problem

Duplicate image replacement — the practice of substituting genuine photographs with stock or recycled images, sometimes through automated database processes — has quietly affected hundreds of Liverpool residents who rely on council services, heritage records and community documentation. Families from Toxteth to Anfield say they have discovered cherished or legally significant photographs swapped out without warning, in some cases without any formal notification from the holding authority.

The issue has gathered urgency in recent weeks because Liverpool City Council is currently midway through a digital migration programme, moving legacy records held by the Liverpool Record Office on Islington into a new centralised archive system. That process, which began in January 2026, has exposed long-standing vulnerabilities in how image metadata is matched and stored, according to documentation circulated at a May 2026 Planning and Development Committee meeting. For residents already navigating a city in transition — with major regeneration projects running from the Baltic Triangle to Everton's new stadium site — the loss of visual documentation can have real consequences for planning objections, heritage listings and community identity projects.

Voices from the streets: what residents have lost

Grace Simmons, 67, from Granby Street in the L8 postcode, says a photograph of her mother submitted as part of a community heritage submission to the Granby Four Streets project was replaced in the digital record with an unrelated image of a woman from a stock library. The submission had been made through the Homebaked Community Land Trust's archive partnership scheme in autumn 2025. She noticed the error only when checking the online portal in March 2026. The original photograph has not been recovered.

In Anfield, members of the Anfield Homebaked co-operative reported a similar problem when historical images linked to a street documentation project on Venmore Street appeared to have been overwritten. The co-operative, which has operated on Oakfield Road since 2012, uses photographic records to support planning and community impact evidence. Losing accurate image records, members say, weakens their ability to demonstrate the historical character of properties under review.

A resident from the Dingle area of south Liverpool described discovering that a photograph attached to a listed building application for a property on Park Road had been replaced with an image taken in a different city entirely. The error was identified by a local planning consultant in February 2026. The resident says the correction process took eleven weeks and required a formal subject access request under UK GDPR.

Scale of the problem and what comes next

Liverpool City Council's digital archive migration covers an estimated 240,000 individual image records, according to the May 2026 committee papers. Migration projects of this scale carry inherent duplication risks: automated deduplication software, which removes what it identifies as copies, can misfire when images share similar file sizes or metadata tags, swapping one authentic image for another. The London Borough of Hackney encountered comparable issues during its 2023 records digitisation programme, which led to a formal review of image-matching protocols across that authority.

The Liverpool Record Office has published guidance on its website advising residents who believe their records may have been affected to contact the office directly at its Islington location and to file a correction request with a reference number before September 30, 2026, when the current migration phase closes. After that date, the old legacy system will be decommissioned and retrieval of original files will become significantly harder.

Organisations including the Merseyside Civic Society, which is based in the city centre, have called for a dedicated helpline or drop-in session for residents unfamiliar with formal correction processes. The Society raised the issue in a written submission to the Council in June 2026, recommending that any automated image replacement be flagged to record-holders before changes go live rather than after.

For residents, the practical advice is clear: check now. Anyone who has submitted photographs to a Liverpool City Council database, heritage programme or community archive in the past three years should log in and verify their records remain intact. If something looks wrong, the clock to formally correct it is already running.