Liverpool's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Visual Heritage

Liverpool City Council's digital archives team is facing a crunch point over how to handle thousands of duplicate and mislabelled photographs spread across at least three separate public-facing databases, a situation that heritage groups and local historians say has been quietly worsening since a major digitisation push began in 2021. The question now is not whether to act, but who decides what stays, what goes, and who owns the corrected record.

The stakes are higher than they might first appear. Liverpool's photographic collections — held across the Liverpool Record Office on Islington, the British Film Institute's regional partner holdings, and the digital catalogue maintained by National Museums Liverpool at the Museum of Liverpool on Pier Head — document more than 150 years of the city's development, from the construction of the Mersey Docks to the redevelopment of Toxteth after the 1981 unrest. Duplicate entries don't just create clutter; they distort search results, misattribute copyright, and in some cases have led to the wrong image being used in planning consultations and school educational packs.

How the Backlog Built Up

The problem stems from well-intentioned but poorly coordinated digitisation projects running in parallel. When Liverpool City Council accelerated its digitisation programme in 2021, contractors working to different technical specifications uploaded batches of images to systems that did not automatically cross-reference each other. National Museums Liverpool ran its own parallel process. The result, according to a 2024 internal review summary published by the council as part of its Digital Infrastructure Strategy, was an estimated 14,000 duplicate image entries across the main public catalogue alone — some images appearing under three or four different reference numbers, occasionally with conflicting location tags.

Granby Street in Toxteth and Scotland Road in Vauxhall are among the areas most affected, partly because both have been the subject of multiple separate heritage photography projects over the past two decades. Images from the Granby Four Streets community regeneration effort, which brought international attention to the area from around 2013 onwards, appear in at least two databases under different licensing terms — a detail that matters commercially as well as archivally.

The cost of a full manual audit has been estimated at between £80,000 and £120,000, according to figures discussed at a Liverpool City Council Culture and Tourism scrutiny panel meeting in March 2026. Automated deduplication software has been trialled but flagged a significant false-positive rate when applied to historical black-and-white photographs, meaning human oversight cannot be cut out entirely.

What Happens Next

Three decisions are now converging. First, the council must decide by September 2026 whether to commission a unified cataloguing system that would bring the Record Office, National Museums Liverpool, and council planning department archives onto a single platform — or continue managing separate databases with shared metadata standards. The latter is cheaper in the short term but leaves the structural problem unresolved.

Second, the question of who arbitrates disputed attributions needs a formal answer. At present, there is no agreed protocol for resolving cases where two databases hold the same image under different copyright or location tags. Community organisations in areas like Anfield and Everton, which have contributed photographs to council digitisation drives, have raised concerns about losing attribution rights if a centralised system overrides their original submissions.

Third, the council's Digital Infrastructure Strategy, due for a full council vote in autumn 2026, will set the budget envelope for the next three years. Heritage advocates are pressing for a dedicated archivist post — currently vacant since February 2026 — to be filled before any new digitisation contracts are signed, arguing that adding more images to a system already struggling with duplicates without expert oversight would make matters worse.

For anyone with a material interest in Liverpool's photographic record — researchers, local history groups, architects working on listed buildings, or residents of neighbourhoods whose visual history is at stake — the autumn council vote is the moment to watch. Submissions to the scrutiny panel are open until 31 July 2026 via the council's online consultation portal.