Cairo's Digital Archives Are Drowning in Duplicate Images — Here's How the City Compares

Egypt's General Authority for Investment and Free Zones quietly acknowledged last spring that its public-facing digital portal contained thousands of repeated image files, some duplicated more than a dozen times across different pages. The disclosure, buried in a routine internal audit summary circulated among ministry departments, put a number on a problem that archivists and IT managers across Cairo's public sector have been complaining about for years: the city's digital repositories are bloated, disorganised, and expensive to maintain.

The issue matters now for a specific reason. Egypt's ongoing IMF loan programme has pushed every ministry to find operational savings, and digital infrastructure — long treated as a back-office afterthought — is finally getting scrutiny. Storage costs real money. The Egyptian pound's successive devaluations since 2022 have made dollar-denominated cloud storage contracts significantly more expensive in local terms, pressing institutions to audit what they actually need to keep.

What Cairo's Institutions Are Doing

The Egyptian National Library and Archives on Corniche el-Nil has been running a phased digitisation project since 2021, and staff there have directly confronted the duplicate problem. The library's digital collections, which include tens of thousands of scanned historical photographs, developed redundancy issues when different digitisation contractors uploaded the same source material independently. The library began deploying perceptual hashing software — a technique that identifies visually identical or near-identical images by generating a numerical fingerprint for each file — as part of a cleanup effort that started in January 2025.

The Cairo Governorate's Urban Observatory, housed in offices near Midan Ramses, faces a different version of the same challenge. The observatory aggregates satellite imagery, drone footage, and street-level photography to track construction progress across the city, including the sprawling New Administrative Capital project 45 kilometres east of central Cairo. Multiple teams uploading imagery from overlapping survey dates created a repository where, by the observatory's own internal count shared at a December 2025 urban planning conference, roughly 18 percent of stored image files were functional duplicates. That figure aligns with benchmarks reported by comparable municipal data offices elsewhere.

How Cairo Stacks Up Against Amman, Nairobi and Casablanca

Amman's Greater Municipality launched a dedicated data hygiene programme in 2023, funded partly through a World Bank urban resilience grant. By late 2024, the municipality reported clearing approximately 2.3 terabytes of redundant visual data from its public infrastructure portal. Nairobi's City Hall, working with a local Kenyan technology firm, ran a similar audit in 2024 and found duplicate imagery was inflating storage costs by an estimated 22 percent annually. Casablanca's urban digital platform, rebuilt ahead of co-hosting the 2030 FIFA World Cup, was designed from the start with automated deduplication baked into the upload pipeline — meaning the problem is largely prevented rather than corrected after the fact.

Cairo's approach, by contrast, remains reactive. There is no single cross-ministerial standard for image file management, and different agencies use different content management systems that do not communicate with each other. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology published guidelines on government data management in 2023, but compliance among city-level bodies is uneven. Cloud storage costs for government entities running on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure contracts — both priced in US dollars — rose substantially after the pound hit 50 to the dollar in early 2024, making the inefficiency harder to ignore.

For institutions looking to act, the most practical near-term step is deploying open-source deduplication tools that work across file formats, rather than waiting for a centralised government mandate that may not arrive quickly. The Egyptian Cabinet's Information and Decision Support Center, based in the Smart Village technology park on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road, has the technical capacity to coordinate a standardised approach and has done similar work on government data quality in other domains. Whether it will take on duplicate image management as a formal programme depends on whether ministry-level pressure builds — and given the current fiscal environment, there is more reason than usual to expect it might.