Zurich's Duplicate Image Crisis: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Zurich's public institutions are sitting on a growing problem. Across cantonal databases, municipal portals and the digitised holdings of institutions such as the Stadtarchiv Zürich on Alfred-Escher-Strasse, duplicate image files have accumulated to a scale that is straining storage budgets and complicating public access to official records. The immediate question is no longer whether to act — it is who decides, and how fast.

The urgency has sharpened this summer. A January 2026 audit commissioned by the Canton of Zurich's Amt für Informatik flagged that roughly 30 percent of image assets stored across shared cantonal systems were duplicates or near-duplicates — a figure that, according to the audit's published summary, translates to tens of thousands of redundant files occupying server capacity that costs the canton an estimated CHF 180,000 annually in excess storage fees. That number does not include the parallel holdings of ETH Zürich's research data infrastructure or the independently managed systems at the Kunsthaus Zürich on Heimplatz, both of which run their own image repositories.

The Deduplication Decision Nobody Wants to Own

The core difficulty is jurisdictional. Zurich operates under a layered governance structure — canton, municipality, and quasi-public institutions each controlling their own IT procurement and data policies. When a duplicate image spans two of those systems, it is genuinely unclear which body bears responsibility for deletion, archiving or consolidation. A working group established in March 2026 under the Direktion der Justiz und des Innern has been meeting monthly, but has yet to publish binding guidelines.

The Swiss federal framework for digital records management, revised in 2022 under the Bundesgesetz über die Archivierung, sets baseline obligations for retention and accessibility but leaves deduplication methodology entirely to cantonal discretion. That gap is exactly where Zurich now finds itself exposed. Without a cantonal standard, individual departments are making ad-hoc decisions: some deleting aggressively, others freezing all image management activity pending clearer instruction.

The stakes are practical. The Stadtarchiv, which holds photographic collections dating to the nineteenth century, has been digitising at a rate of approximately 12,000 images per quarter since 2023. Each digitisation batch risks introducing further duplicates when files are transferred between its internal system and the canton's shared cloud environment, hosted by Abraxas Informatik AG in Winterthur. Staff at the archive have reportedly paused one transfer cycle this spring while awaiting guidance — a delay that pushes the completion of the Quartierbilder project, documenting Zurich's neighbourhood transformation, into late 2027 at the earliest.

What the Next Six Months Look Like

Three decisions will define how this resolves. First, the Direktion der Justiz und des Innern working group is expected to circulate a draft deduplication protocol before the September 2026 Kantonsrat session. If approved, it would establish for the first time a unified hash-based identification standard for all cantonal image assets — meaning every file gets a unique digital fingerprint, and true duplicates are automatically flagged rather than manually reviewed.

Second, ETH Zürich's IT services division is independently evaluating whether to join a proposed Verbund, or consortium, with the Zentralbibliothek Zürich on Zähringerplatz that would pool image storage under a single deduplication engine. A decision is expected by October 2026. If ETH opts in, it would bring the city's two most image-intensive institutions under a common technical standard for the first time.

Third, the question of cost allocation remains open. Under current cantonal finance rules, savings from storage reduction flow back to central IT budgets rather than to the departments that generated them — which gives individual units little incentive to cooperate. A proposed amendment, flagged in the June 2026 session of the Gemeinderat, would return a share of savings to originating departments. That amendment goes to committee in August.

Until those three pieces lock into place, Zurich's image archives will keep accumulating redundancy at a rate the January audit described as unsustainable. The technical fix is straightforward. The political sequencing is not.