How San Diego's City Records Ended Up Full of Duplicate Photos — and Why It's Finally Being Fixed

San Diego's Department of IT Services confirmed this spring that the city's centralized digital asset library contains thousands of duplicate images — some documents and permit photos catalogued under multiple file numbers, others simply uploaded twice during rushed data migrations that began in 2020. The redundancy problem has slowed public records requests, confused planning staff at the downtown Development Services Center on First Avenue, and complicated a broader push to modernize how the city handles visual documentation of infrastructure and neighborhood projects.

The timing matters because San Diego is midway through a multi-year overhaul of its permitting and land-use systems. The city rolled out its Accela-based eTRAKiT portal upgrade in phases starting in late 2021, and each migration cycle created opportunities for files to be ingested more than once. A similar cleanup effort in 2019 — before the pandemic accelerated digitization — took the city's GIS division roughly eight months to complete for just one department's records, according to city budget documents from that fiscal year.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem go back further than 2020. When the city consolidated several departmental file servers onto a shared cloud platform beginning in fiscal year 2018-19, each department essentially exported its own image folders independently. The Planning Department, the Public Works offices on Pacific Highway, and the Parks and Recreation Division all ran parallel exports over a six-month window. Without a unified deduplication protocol in place, identical files landed in the new system under different metadata tags — different upload dates, different case numbers, sometimes different file names entirely.

The pandemic made things worse. Between March 2020 and the end of 2021, the city expedited digitization of tens of thousands of paper inspection records to support remote work. Contractors scanning physical files at the City Clerk's Office on Second Avenue were working under tight deadlines, and quality-control checkpoints that would normally flag matching image hashes were bypassed to meet volume targets. City budget documents show the digitization contract was valued at approximately $1.4 million over that period.

North Park and Barrio Logan bore a disproportionate share of the confusion in the planning context. Both neighborhoods saw surges in permit activity during 2020 and 2021 — North Park driven by accessory dwelling unit applications, Barrio Logan by industrial-to-residential conversion projects near the waterfront. High permit volumes in those ZIP codes meant more images uploaded per week, and more opportunities for the system to ingest duplicates before anyone caught them.

What a Fix Actually Looks Like

The city's current approach involves running automated hash-matching software across the full archive — a process the IT Services division began in March 2026 and expects to complete by the end of the third quarter. The software flags images whose pixel data is identical regardless of filename or metadata, then routes them to a human review queue rather than auto-deleting anything. That manual review step, while slower, protects against false positives that could accidentally wipe out legitimately distinct images that happen to look similar.

The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and several community planning groups in Mission Hills and Golden Hill have separately raised the issue with city council offices, noting that duplicate records have occasionally delayed certificate-of-occupancy issuance when inspectors pull the wrong image version during final review. Those delays, even when measured in days rather than weeks, carry real costs for small contractors and property owners waiting on final approvals before tenants can move in.

For residents or businesses currently navigating a permit or records request, the practical advice from city staff is straightforward: if a public records response includes image files that appear identical, flag it in writing to the City Clerk's Office at clerk@sandiego.gov and reference the case number. That notation helps the IT Services review team prioritize which clusters of duplicates to resolve first. The city says the archive review will not affect the public-facing eTRAKiT portal during the cleanup, and new uploads are being deduplicated in real time under protocols put in place in January 2026.