Glasgow Archives Crisis: Duplicate Photos Erase Real Residents' Faces

A growing number of Glasgow community organisations are raising the alarm about a problem that sounds minor until it happens to your family: digitised archives and local history collections increasingly contain images where one photograph has been used to replace another, leaving the wrong face attached to the wrong name, sometimes permanently.

The issue has surfaced most visibly in the work of groups digitising tenement records, school photographs and church registers from the mid-twentieth century. Residents from Govan, Maryhill and Dennistoun have all contacted community heritage projects in recent weeks to flag cases where a relative's image had been substituted with a duplicate from an entirely different record, often because of bulk scanning errors or metadata mismatches during upload.

Voices from the streets

At the Govan Cross community hub on Langlands Road, volunteers running the Govan Heritage Trust's oral history project say they have logged at least fourteen confirmed cases of duplicate image replacement since January 2026. People arriving to verify family photographs against council records have found unfamiliar faces where they expected their own relatives. For many families whose ancestors left few written documents, a single photograph is the only tangible link to a grandparent or great-uncle.

In Maryhill, the North Glasgow Community Archive — which has been cataloguing photographs from the former Wyndford estate and surrounding streets since 2019 — identified the problem partly through feedback from residents attending its monthly drop-in sessions at Maryhill Burgh Halls on Gairbraid Avenue. Staff there noticed that a batch of images uploaded in late 2025, following a bulk scanning contract with an external firm, contained recurring duplicates where a single source image had been mapped to multiple individual entries.

The harm is not abstract. One Dennistoun resident, who has been trying to build a record of her late mother's side of the family, described discovering that the photograph labelled with her grandmother's name in a digitised Parkhead church register actually showed a different woman entirely — someone whose name appeared nowhere in her family tree. The original image, she believes, was lost in the duplication process.

The scale and what's being done

Scotland's broader heritage digitisation push has accelerated since the Scottish Government's 2023 Culture Strategy committed additional funding to community archive work. The Mitchell Library on North Street in Glasgow holds one of the largest municipal photographic collections in the UK, and staff there have been working with community partners to develop quality-control protocols specifically to catch duplicate image errors before they are published online.

The Glasgow City Heritage Trust, which distributed more than £1.2 million in conservation grants during 2024-25, does not currently list image integrity auditing as a standalone funded activity, though representatives have previously indicated that digitisation best practice is included in guidance issued to grant recipients. The trust did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Community archivists say the fix is neither quick nor cheap. Manually reviewing a collection of five thousand images to check for duplicates can take a single trained volunteer upward of three months. For groups operating on shoestring budgets — many North Glasgow community archive volunteers work unpaid — that is an enormous ask.

The most practical advice coming from within the sector right now is straightforward: if you have physical photographs, do not assume the digitised version held by any institution is accurate. Bring originals to community drop-in sessions, cross-reference against multiple collections, and flag discrepancies directly to the holding organisation. The North Glasgow Community Archive asks anyone who spots an error to email its collections team with the record reference number and a description of the problem, so cases can be tracked and prioritised. The Maryhill Burgh Halls drop-in runs on the first Saturday of each month. The next session is 4 August 2026.

For families who have already lost the physical originals, the window to correct the record is narrowing with each passing year.