'My whole archive was wiped': Zurich residents speak out on the hidden cost of duplicate image replacement

Beat Züger spent three years building a photo archive of street life along Langstrasse. Then, in the spring of 2025, a cloud storage migration flagged several hundred of his images as duplicates and replaced them with lower-resolution substitutes — automatically, without notification. He noticed only months later when a gallery in Zurich's Kreis 4 asked for print-ready files. The originals were gone.

Züger's experience is not unique. Across Zurich, freelancers, small businesses and community archivists are raising concerns about a technical process — duplicate image replacement — that strips metadata, overwrites originals and, in some cases, permanently alters digital records. The problem sits at the intersection of cloud storage policy, intellectual property and the practical realities of working in a city where housing costs already squeeze creative workers into precarious margins.

What duplicate replacement actually does

The process itself sounds benign: storage systems scan for identical or near-identical image files, keep one copy, and discard the rest. In practice, platforms use perceptual hashing algorithms that compare visual similarity rather than exact file data. That means a photograph edited for colour correction or cropped for a specific client can be flagged as a duplicate of its original and silently overwritten. Metadata — the embedded information that records authorship, creation date and licensing terms — is frequently stripped in the process.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, based in Bern, classifies that embedded metadata as part of the work's rights-management information under Swiss copyright law, specifically Article 39a of the Urheberrechtsgesetz as revised in 2020. Removing it without consent is a legal violation — but enforcement against overseas platform operators remains difficult, and few individual creators have the resources to pursue claims.

In Zurich, the issue has been discussed at monthly meetups organised by Opendata.ch, the Swiss open data association that holds regular events at Impact Hub Zurich on Sihlquai. Participants have included archivists from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich on Zähringerplatz, digital artists, and community photographers from neighbourhoods including Wiedikon and Altstetten. Several described discovering image losses only after attempting to export or migrate their own collections.

Who is most exposed

Small operators bear the sharpest burden. A printshop owner in Altstetten said she lost client-supplied artwork files during a 2024 platform update — a situation that required her to contact every affected customer individually and recreate several jobs from scratch. One digital marketing cooperative based near Escher-Wyss-Platz estimated it spent roughly 40 hours over a two-month period in late 2025 auditing and restoring image libraries after a bulk sync operation triggered unexpected deduplication.

The housing crisis compounds the pressure. Zurich's average residential rental vacancy rate sat below one percent as of mid-2025, according to the city's own Wohnungsmarktbericht. Creatives and small businesses displaced from cheaper studio spaces in Zurich West or along Hardstrasse have moved workflows entirely into cloud systems, increasing their exposure to exactly these platform-level decisions. There is less slack — financial or logistical — to absorb a data loss event.

ETH Zurich's Media Technology Center, which runs collaborative projects between the university and the Swiss media industry, has flagged perceptual hashing accuracy as an area requiring better transparency standards in its publicly available research notes. The center's work touches on how automated content management systems interact with professional image archives, though it focuses primarily on broadcast media rather than individual creators.

Switzerland's Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner — the FDPIC — can receive complaints under the revised Datenschutzgesetz that came into force in September 2023, and some legal observers have suggested that undisclosed deletion of rights-management information may fall within its remit. Filing a formal complaint requires documenting the original file state, which is precisely what creators often cannot do after the fact.

The practical advice circulating at Opendata.ch sessions: maintain a local, offline backup updated at least weekly; embed rights metadata in a secondary sidecar XMP file that deduplication algorithms are less likely to target; and check platform terms of service specifically for language around content optimisation and storage management. None of it is a complete solution — but for photographers on Langstrasse and archivists on Zähringerplatz alike, it is what they have right now.