Singapore's Duplicate Image Problem: The Numbers That Are Costing Businesses Real Money

Singapore businesses are sitting on billions of redundant image files. That is the blunt finding emerging from audits conducted by digital asset management firms operating out of the one-north technology cluster in Buona Vista, where several media-tech startups have begun offering automated duplicate-detection services to enterprise clients. The trigger: cloud storage bills that have quietly doubled or tripled for companies that migrated to remote-first workflows after 2020 and never cleaned up the mess they left behind.

The scale matters because Singapore has spent the better part of a decade positioning itself as Southeast Asia's data and creative hub. The Infocomm Media Development Authority has ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into that ambition. Letting redundant image data eat into margins is not a trivial housekeeping issue — it directly affects the commercial case for hosting regional content operations here instead of in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok.

What the Audits Are Actually Finding

Across a sample of 40 Singapore-registered companies audited by one Jurong East-based data consultancy between January and May 2026, duplicate or near-duplicate images accounted for between 23 and 41 percent of total image storage volume, according to figures shared with The Daily Singapore. The median company in that sample held roughly 1.4 terabytes of image assets, meaning somewhere between 320 gigabytes and 570 gigabytes per organisation was effectively wasted space. At current Amazon Web Services Singapore region pricing, one terabyte of standard S3 storage runs approximately USD 23 per month. Multiply that by thousands of files never flagged, never deleted, and the annual bill climbs fast.

The problem is not unique to any one industry. Retail groups running e-commerce catalogues on platforms linked to Lazada and Shopee Singapore are among the worst offenders, largely because product photography workflows generate multiple near-identical shots — slightly different angles, minor colour corrections — that get uploaded without any deduplication step. Media companies operating out of Mapletree Business City in Pasir Panjang face a related but distinct version of the issue: archive photographs ingested from legacy systems often survive as three or four separate copies across different folder hierarchies, each with a slightly different filename.

The National Library Board's digital preservation team has grappled with a version of this challenge for years across its heritage digitisation programmes. Public sector archive work, however, benefits from dedicated metadata standards that most private sector firms simply do not apply. The gap between public-sector data hygiene and commercial practice is measurable: a 2025 survey by the Singapore Computer Society found that fewer than 30 percent of SMEs here had any formal digital asset management policy in place, compared with 61 percent of companies with more than 200 employees.

Automated Tools Are Catching Up, But Slowly

Perceptual hashing — technology that generates a fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical files even when filenames differ — has existed for years. Adoption in Singapore's SME sector has lagged badly. Tools such as those offered by local firms at the Block 71 startup campus in Ayer Rajah Crescent have brought the entry cost for basic deduplication software down to roughly SGD 80 to SGD 150 per month for a small business. That price point removes the cost barrier. The remaining obstacle is workflow: most companies have no designated person responsible for image library hygiene, and the task keeps being deferred.

For companies that act now, the return is straightforward. Removing duplicate images cuts storage costs immediately, speeds up content management system load times, and reduces the risk of publishing outdated product images — a real commercial liability for any retailer. The practical first step is running a free audit using any of several open-source perceptual hash tools, establishing a baseline of how bad the duplication actually is, then building a policy that prevents the problem from recurring. The data on this is already clear. The only question is when finance directors start reading the storage invoices closely enough to demand action.