Helsinki Takes a Methodical Approach to Duplicate Image Replacement — But How Does It Stack Up Against Stockholm and Amsterdam?

Helsinki city officials confirmed this spring that a systematic audit of duplicate imagery across municipal digital platforms — from the city's open data portal at hri.fi to neighbourhood planning documents published by the Kaupunkiympäristön toimiala — identified over 4,200 redundant image files requiring review or replacement. The audit, completed in April 2026, marks the first time the city has tackled the problem at scale rather than addressing it department by department.

The timing matters. European cities are under pressure from the EU's revised Public Sector Information Directive, which sets cleaner metadata and accessibility standards for government-held digital assets. The deadline for full compliance fell in early 2026, pushing municipal IT departments from Tallinn to Vienna to finally confront years of accumulated duplication in their content management systems. Helsinki was not ahead of the curve — but it is not the furthest behind, either.

What Helsinki Is Actually Doing

The city's main effort is running through the Helsinki City Channels unit, which manages visual assets used in communications campaigns, the city website at hel.fi, and internal intranet systems. The unit is working alongside Helsingin kaupunginkirjasto — the city library network, which maintains its own Finna-integrated image collections — to cross-reference duplicate files and assign canonical replacements. Kallio Library on Viides linja has been one of the pilot sites for the new tagging protocol, processing roughly 600 images in a trial phase that ran from February through May this year.

The process is not purely automated. Staff are manually reviewing images flagged by the city's asset management software because automated tools struggle with near-duplicate photographs — two images of Esplanadi Park taken minutes apart, for example, or two versions of the same infrastructure diagram at different resolutions. That human bottleneck has slowed progress. As of June 2026, approximately 1,800 of the 4,200 flagged files had been resolved.

Stockholm's Stadsarkivet completed a comparable exercise in 2024, processing its backlog of roughly 6,000 duplicate records within eight months by deploying a dedicated four-person team funded through the Swedish national digitisation programme Digisam. Amsterdam's Gemeente Amsterdam finished a similar project in 2023, aided by open-source tooling developed through the Europeana network. Helsinki has neither a dedicated team of that size nor equivalent external funding, relying instead on existing staff absorbing the work alongside other responsibilities.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Duplicate images are not merely a tidiness problem. When a city planning document contains an outdated site photograph that has been copied and re-used across multiple neighbourhood zoning reports — as happened with several documents covering the Kalasatama development zone — corrections must be made retroactively across every instance. That compounds workload and creates legal ambiguity around which version of a planning image is authoritative.

The practical cost is measurable. The city's own IT procurement data, published through the Hankinnat.fi transparency portal, shows Helsinki spending approximately €180,000 on digital asset management licensing in 2025. Consultants familiar with similar municipal projects in Europe suggest that unresolved duplication issues can inflate ongoing storage and licensing costs by between 10 and 20 percent annually, though Helsinki has not published its own figure for this specifically.

Tallinn, by comparison, addressed the problem largely by migrating to a single centralised content management platform in 2022, eliminating the fragmented system architecture that allows duplication to accumulate in the first place. Helsinki's IT infrastructure remains more distributed, which makes a wholesale platform migration less straightforward and more expensive to contemplate.

City officials have indicated that a follow-up phase of the audit will be completed before the end of 2026, with a target of resolving all 4,200 flagged files before the new year. Residents or organisations that use city-published images — journalists, urban planners, community associations in neighbourhoods like Vallila or Arabianranta — can flag potential discrepancies directly through the hel.fi feedback form. The library network's Finna portal also accepts user-submitted corrections to image metadata, a crowdsourced layer that Stockholm and Amsterdam have also leaned on to accelerate their own clean-up efforts.