Toronto Archivists Tackle Thousands of Duplicate Photos From Rushed Digitization

The problem did not start with one bad upload. Toronto's sprawling network of municipal image libraries, spanning everything from Toronto Public Library's digital collections to the City of Toronto's internal communications asset bank, has accumulated thousands of duplicate photographs over roughly two decades of piecemeal digitization, according to records filed with the City Clerk's office and reviewed by The Daily Toronto.

The practical stakes are higher than they might appear. When the City of Toronto's Communications and Public Information division needs to illustrate a press release about Eglinton Avenue construction or a new affordable housing announcement in Scarborough, staff pulling from a disorganized asset library risk republishing outdated images, photographs showing, say, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT in a phase of construction that no longer reflects current reality, or aerial shots of the Portlands before the flood-protection project reshaped the shoreline. Misfiled or duplicated images don't just waste server storage; they erode public trust when wrong information ships publicly.

A Timeline of How It Got This Bad

The roots go back to the early 2000s, when individual city departments began digitizing their own photo archives without a common file-naming convention or a central catalogue authority. Planning, Parks and Recreation, Transportation Services, and the Toronto Public Health unit each built separate repositories. A photograph of Nathan Phillips Square taken during a 2003 anti-war rally might exist in three separate databases under three different file names, with conflicting metadata and copyright notes.

The COVID-19 pandemic made things dramatically worse. Between March 2020 and the end of 2021, city communications teams scrambled to produce a torrent of public-health graphics, neighbourhood outreach materials in over 180 languages, and virtual-event promotional assets. Much of that material was assembled quickly from existing image libraries, copied, cropped, and re-uploaded without being reconciled against the master catalogue. Staff working remotely across different networks had inconsistent access to shared drives. The result was a second wave of duplication layered on top of the first.

Toronto Public Library's digitization program, which spans branches from the Bloor/Gladstone library in Little Portugal to the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge Street, faced similar pressures. The library system holds more than 500,000 digitized historical images, according to its published collection statistics, and staff have long acknowledged that deduplication across that archive is an ongoing, resource-intensive task rather than a solved problem.

What's Being Attempted Now

The City of Toronto's 2024-2026 Digital Infrastructure Roadmap, a document publicly available through the City Clerk, identified asset management reform as a priority line item under the broader Open Government initiative. The plan calls for migration toward a unified Digital Asset Management platform that would apply automated hash-matching, a technical process that identifies visually identical or near-identical image files, to flag duplicates before they are ingested into the live library.

The Eglinton Crosstown project, which has consumed enormous public attention and generated thousands of construction-phase photographs across multiple agencies including Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario, has itself become a test case. With the LRT line still working toward full service as of mid-2026, image libraries associated with the project contain multiple versions of photos showing stations at King-Spadina, Laird, and Kennedy that are now either operationally outdated or simply redundant. Sorting them retroactively is painstaking manual work.

For residents and journalists who rely on city image banks, whether through Access to Information requests or public-facing portals, the near-term advice from municipal information professionals is straightforward: always check the metadata date stamp on any image pulled from a city source, and request confirmation that the file has not been superseded. The City's Open Data portal, at open.toronto.ca, includes a last-updated field on each dataset, though image asset libraries are not uniformly integrated into that system yet.

The longer arc of reform points toward standardization arriving gradually, department by department, over the remainder of the current budget cycle. The 2026 city budget allocated funding for IT modernization broadly, but the specific line for DAM platform licensing has not been broken out in public-facing budget summaries. What is clear is that the archive mess is real, documented, and finally on someone's work order.