How Glasgow's Streets Ended Up Plastered With the Same Faces: The Story Behind the Duplicate Image Problem

Walk along Argyle Street on any given Saturday and you will see the same stock photograph of a smiling mixed-age group repeated across three separate council information boards, two community noticeboard posters, and a transport update leaflet tucked into a bus shelter at the Trongate end. Nobody planned it that way. It happened because Glasgow City Council's internal image library, last comprehensively audited in 2019, was never updated to prevent duplicate selections when different departments drew from the same pool of approved assets.

The issue matters now because the council is mid-way through a £2.3 million overhaul of its public communications infrastructure — a project called GCC Digital Foundations, launched in January 2026 — and the duplication problem has become a visible symbol of the broader dysfunction the programme is meant to address. Residents and community groups who worked with the council on neighbourhood consultation materials have been pointing out the repetition for months. The problem is not cosmetic. When the same image appears in a drug awareness campaign in Govan and a cycling promotion in Partick, the messaging loses credibility.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem stretch back to 2012, when the council consolidated several borough communications teams under a single city-wide unit following local government reorganisation. At the time, each area — Southside, East End, the West End, and the city centre — maintained its own image archive. The merger was rushed. Files were migrated onto a shared server on Frederick Street without a proper deduplication process, and search tagging was inconsistent. A 2021 internal review by the council's Digital Services directorate found more than 14,000 image files across the shared system, of which an estimated 30 percent were near-identical duplicates or low-resolution variants of the same original photograph. That review was never published publicly but was referenced in council committee minutes from March 2022, which are available on the council's website.

Community organisations noticed the effects early. Glasgow Life, the arm's-length body that runs the city's museums, libraries, and sports facilities, began flagging the duplication issue to the council in 2023 after volunteers preparing materials for the Govanhill International Festival found that three of the five council-supplied images recommended for use had already appeared in a 2022 homelessness awareness campaign. Glasgow Life declined to comment for this article. The duplication problem also touched the Merchant City Initiative, a business improvement district covering the grid of streets between Trongate and George Square, which reported similar frustrations when putting together streetscape promotional materials in late 2024.

What the GCC Digital Foundations Programme Is Trying to Do

The January 2026 launch of GCC Digital Foundations set a target of rationalising the council's asset management system by the end of the 2026-27 financial year. The programme includes a dedicated image audit workstream, which began in April 2026 and is being handled partly in-house and partly through a contracted digital agency based in the city. The goal is to reduce the active image library from its current unwieldy scale down to a curated, tagged, searchable collection, with clear licensing metadata attached to every file — something the old system entirely lacked.

The broader lesson here is a familiar one in Scottish local government. Budget pressures after 2010 led to repeated deferrals of routine digital maintenance work. A task that might have cost £40,000 to handle properly in 2014 has now, because of accumulated debt and the scale of migration required, grown into a six-figure line item inside a multi-million-pound programme. Other councils, including Edinburgh City Council, have faced similar reckoning with legacy digital infrastructure in recent years, though the specifics differ.

For Glaswegians, the practical upshot is that the same faces staring out from noticeboards around the city should start to look a little more varied by early 2027, assuming the audit workstream stays on schedule. Community groups working with the council on local projects are being encouraged to contact the Digital Foundations team directly if they spot duplication in materials currently in circulation. Details are listed on the Glasgow City Council website under the Digital Foundations programme page.