Zurich's Digital Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — Officials and Experts Are Pushing Back

The problem sounds mundane until you look at the numbers. Zurich's public institutions are sitting on vast digital image libraries bloated with duplicates — identical or near-identical files stored multiple times across different servers, departments, and archival systems — and the question of who should fix it, and how, is sharpening into a genuine policy dispute.

The issue has gained urgency in mid-2026 for a specific reason: the Canton of Zurich's ongoing digital infrastructure review, running since January under the Staatskanzlei, is expected to produce binding recommendations by September. Several departments flagged duplicate image data as a measurable cost driver during the review's first phase, according to publicly released working documents from the cantonal administration. With server storage costs rising across Swiss public institutions, the duplication problem is no longer being treated as a housekeeping matter.

What the Institutions Are Saying

ETH Zurich, whose main campus sits along Rämistrasse, has one of the largest scientific image repositories in the German-speaking world. The university's IT Services division published an internal audit summary in March 2026 noting that automated deduplication tools had already been piloted across three research departments, with results suggesting storage reduction was achievable at scale. The university has not published a final figure for how much redundant data exists across the full institution.

The City of Zurich's own digital archiving body, Stadt Zürich Stadtarchiv on Neumarkt, manages historical and administrative image collections that stretch back decades in digitised form. Archivists there have publicly flagged the tension between preservation mandates — which sometimes require keeping multiple file versions for provenance reasons — and the push from IT managers to eliminate redundancy. That distinction matters: not every duplicate is an error. Some are intentional backups; others are versioned originals required under cantonal retention law.

Zürich Insurance and UBS, both headquartered within the city's financial district along Bahnhofstrasse and Paradeplatz respectively, are facing the same internal debate in the private sector. Industry bodies representing Swiss financial services firms have noted that regulatory image documentation — from KYC verification photos to scanned contract pages — accumulates at volume and that deduplication without proper audit trails can create compliance exposure under FINMA rules.

The Cost Argument and What Comes Next

Pricing context helps explain why the conversation is intensifying now. Enterprise cloud storage for Swiss institutions typically runs between CHF 0.02 and CHF 0.05 per gigabyte per month depending on tier and provider, according to publicly available Swiss federal IT procurement benchmarks published by the Bundesamt für Informatik und Telekommunikation. For large organisations holding hundreds of terabytes of image data — a realistic figure for a university the size of ETH — even modest duplication rates translate into six-figure annual costs.

Computer vision specialists at ETH's Computer Vision Laboratory, based in the CAB building on Universitätstrasse, have been working on perceptual hashing techniques that can identify near-duplicate images even when file metadata differs. The approach goes beyond simple checksum matching, which catches only byte-for-byte identical copies. Researchers in this space have noted that near-duplicate detection is computationally heavier and requires human review workflows to avoid false positives — an important caveat for institutions considering fully automated deletion pipelines.

The Staatskanzlei's September deadline is now the practical focal point. Departments that submit deduplication proposals before then may qualify for earmarked funding under the canton's 2026 digital infrastructure budget line, which was set at CHF 14.2 million at the start of the fiscal year. Institutions that wait risk being folded into a standardised cantonal solution they may have less influence over.

For city residents and researchers who depend on public image archives — from the Stadtarchiv on Neumarkt to the Zentralbibliothek Zürich on Zähringerplatz — the practical advice from archivists is consistent: digital access to collections is unlikely to be disrupted, because any responsible deduplication process runs parallel to live archives rather than replacing them mid-stream. The messier work happens in the background, and institutions that have been through it consistently report the process takes longer than initial estimates suggest.