Ho Chi Minh City's Digital Archive Crisis Forces Costly Database Overhaul

Thousands of duplicate property photographs, government identification images, and promotional assets are clogging the digital systems of businesses and public agencies across Ho Chi Minh City, creating a problem that administrators and technology providers say has been building since at least 2018. The immediate trigger is a push by city authorities, working through the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Information and Communications, to migrate legacy records into unified digital platforms ahead of a national e-government deadline. That process has exposed the scale of image duplication nobody had formally quantified before.

The stakes are practical and financial. Real estate portals active in District 2 and Bình Thạnh, two of the city's busiest property markets, estimate that listings carrying duplicate or misidentified photographs slow transaction times and inflate customer-service costs. The real estate correction that has gripped the city since late 2022 made investors more cautious, which means a single incorrect or duplicated property image now carries more reputational weight than it did during the boom years. For e-commerce operators clustered around the Tân Bình technology and logistics corridor, the problem compounds: product images uploaded multiple times under different SKUs distort inventory counts and generate incorrect tax filings.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots go back to the rapid digitisation wave that followed the city's COVID-19 lockdowns of mid-2021. Businesses and government offices that had operated on paper scrambled to upload documents, identity photographs, permits, and product catalogues to comply with new digital-first regulations. Speed was the priority. Quality control was not. The Ho Chi Minh City Smart City Programme, launched formally in 2017 and accelerated after the pandemic, absorbed enormous volumes of image data from dozens of municipal departments without a standardised deduplication protocol in place.

By 2023, the National Population Database, which affects every resident registering for services at district-level offices, including the busy Ward 22 administrative centre in Bình Thạnh, was reported domestically to contain a measurable proportion of duplicate citizen photographs linked to mismatched identity records. Civic technology observers noted that the problem was not unique to Vietnam: similar challenges emerged in digitisation drives across Southeast Asia. But Ho Chi Minh City's sheer density, roughly 9.3 million registered residents as of the 2024 national census, with a floating population that pushes the real figure higher, meant the duplication rate translated into a large absolute number of problem records.

Private sector platforms accelerated the issue further. Shopee Vietnam and Lazada, both of which maintain major operational hubs in the city's Tân Phú and District 7 office clusters, onboarded tens of thousands of new merchants between 2020 and 2022. Those merchants, many of them small businesses operating from apartments in Gò Vấp and Thủ Đức, uploaded product images copied from manufacturer websites, competitor listings, or Chinese wholesale platforms. Deduplication was largely left to automated systems that proved inadequate for Vietnamese-language metadata.

What Needs to Happen Now

The Department of Information and Communications has set an internal review milestone for the third quarter of 2026 to assess image database integrity across priority public systems. Technology vendors operating in the city's Quang Trung Software City, the 43-hectare technology park in District 12 that houses more than 160 IT companies, say demand for image-recognition and deduplication tools has risen noticeably since January. Several firms have begun offering deduplication audits as a standalone service, priced locally at between 50 million and 150 million Vietnamese đồng depending on database size.

For businesses still operating with unaudited image libraries, the practical advice from IT consultants at Quang Trung is consistent: conduct a hash-based duplicate scan before any major platform migration, assign a named data steward to approve image uploads, and tag all assets with Vietnamese-language metadata from the point of creation rather than retrofitting labels later. Government agencies facing the national e-government deadline should prioritise citizen-facing identity records first, since those carry the highest compliance risk under Decree 13 on personal data protection, which came into force in July 2023. The backlog did not appear overnight. Clearing it will take the same sustained, unglamorous administrative effort that created it.