Digital Archivists Battle Corruption Crisis in Ho Chi Minh City's Photo Files

City records managers, marketing agencies, and e-commerce operators across Ho Chi Minh City spent much of this week doing something unglamorous but increasingly urgent: hunting down duplicate images buried inside their digital storage systems and deleting them. The trigger was a combination of factors that converged in late June, a surge in AI-assisted content production, a push by the municipal government's Department of Information and Communications to digitise legacy paper records, and a rash of storage-cost overruns at several District 1 tech firms.

The problem is not cosmetic. When image libraries carry thousands of duplicate or near-duplicate files, search tools degrade, upload pipelines slow, and, critically for businesses operating on Vietnam's two dominant e-commerce platforms, Shopee and Tiki, product listings can be flagged for redundant content and pushed down in search rankings. For a city that processed an estimated 1.4 million online retail transactions per day in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Vietnam E-Commerce and Digital Economy Agency, the operational stakes are real.

Where the Problem Shows Up in the City

The issue has been most visible this week at two ends of the city's digital economy. In the Saigon Hi-Tech Park in District 9, now formally Thu Duc City, several resident technology companies reported storage audits revealing that image duplication rates inside internal content management systems ran as high as 30 percent of total file counts. That figure emerged from internal assessments shared at a working session organised by the Ho Chi Minh City Computer Association, known as HCA, on July 2 at its office on Hoang Dieu 2 Street. The HCA did not release those figures publicly, and The Daily Ho Chi Minh City is not attributing specific company names to the statistic.

Across town in the Phu My Hung commercial district in District 7, home to a dense cluster of design studios, advertising agencies, and the regional offices of several multinational brands, studio managers have been grappling with a related headache. Rapid adoption of AI image-generation tools since late 2024 has flooded shared drives with visually similar outputs that traditional deduplication software, which compares file hashes rather than visual content, cannot catch. Two district-based creative agencies contacted by this newspaper described spending multiple working days this week manually reviewing flagged image batches, though neither authorised named comment.

New Tools and the Road Ahead

The timing of this week's scramble is partly explained by a deadline. Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology has been pushing enterprises to align data governance practices with Circular 09/2023/TT-BKHCN, a regulation governing the management of digital assets in licensed technology zones. Companies operating inside Saigon Hi-Tech Park face compliance review cycles tied to their zone licensing, and mid-year is a standard checkpoint period.

Several local software vendors moved quickly to fill the gap. NTQ Solution, a Hanoi-headquartered technology company with a significant development team in Ho Chi Minh City's Binh Thanh District, began promoting a perceptual hashing module this week, software that compares images visually rather than by file signature, catching duplicates even when file formats or resolutions have changed. Pricing for enterprise licensing starts at around 15 million Vietnamese dong per month for teams of up to 50 users, according to information published on the company's Vietnamese-language product page.

For smaller operators, the independent sellers on Shopee, the boutique fashion labels shooting product photos in shared studios along Nguyen Trai Street in District 5, the immediate practical advice from digital consultants this week has been simpler: run a free perceptual hash check using open-source tools such as ImageHash before uploading any new batch of product images, and audit existing listings for flagged content at least once per quarter.

The Department of Information and Communications has not yet issued specific guidance on image deduplication for commercial operators, but its broader push to standardise digital asset management across Ho Chi Minh City's municipal offices, a programme budgeted at 42 billion dong for fiscal year 2026 under the city's digital transformation master plan, means the conversation is unlikely to stay confined to the tech parks much longer. Businesses that have not yet addressed their image libraries should expect the window for easy fixes to narrow as compliance pressure spreads outward from the zones to the wider commercial sector.