'My whole life history, gone': Singaporeans speak out on the pain of losing irreplaceable photos to duplicate-image purges

When a Toa Payoh resident ran a duplicate-image cleaner on her phone last December, she expected to recover a few hundred megabytes. Instead, the app flagged and deleted more than 1,400 photographs — including the only digital copies of her mother's funeral in 2019. She is not alone.

Across Singapore, a growing number of residents are discovering that duplicate-detection software, whether bundled into Android phones, Apple's iOS, or third-party apps available on the Google Play Store, is making irreversible errors. Images that appear visually identical to an algorithm — same framing, milliseconds apart in timestamp — are often not identical in meaning. One might be slightly better exposed; another might be the sole surviving copy after a failed cloud sync. When the software deletes the wrong file, there is frequently no recovery path.

The issue has gained urgency in 2026 because smartphone manufacturers have aggressively pushed on-device storage management features this year. Google's Pixel 9 line, released in late 2025, ships with a default storage assistant that runs weekly scans. Apple introduced a similar Reduce Duplicates function in iOS 18, activated by default on devices with less than 64GB of free space. More Singaporeans are also migrating old photo libraries from aging laptops and external drives onto their phones, increasing the volume of near-duplicate images and the likelihood of software errors.

Residents in Queenstown and Ang Mo Kio describe the fallout

A retired teacher living near Stirling Road in Queenstown said she lost a folder of photographs from her late husband's final birthday celebration in 2021 after her daughter helped her run a cleanup tool in March this year. The images had been backed up on a portable hard drive, but that drive failed eight months earlier. The phone had been the last copy. Community volunteers at the Queenstown Community Centre, where the woman regularly attends Mandarin classes, say they have heard similar stories at least a dozen times in the past six months.

In Ang Mo Kio, a self-employed hawker who runs a stall at Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10 Market and Food Centre described losing five years of food photographs he had planned to use for a cookbook project. He had stored his library on a mid-range Samsung Galaxy device and trusted a free duplicate-finder app downloaded in January 2026. The app offered no pre-deletion preview and no recycle bin. The files were gone within minutes.

The problem is not purely individual. The National Library Board's digitisation outreach programme, which has since 2022 encouraged residents to photograph and preserve heritage materials — old kampong images, wedding portraits, identity documents — has fielded complaints from participants who digitised family records only to have duplicates created during the scanning process subsequently wiped by cleanup tools. The NLB's Preservation of Sites and Memories programme explicitly warns participants to back up to at least two separate locations before running any storage management software, but the guidance is not always read before the damage is done.

What to do before running any duplicate-detection tool

Digital preservation specialists consistently recommend the same precautions. Back up the entire library to an external medium — a 2TB portable solid-state drive now retails for around S$120 at Challenger outlets on Orchard Road — before allowing any software to scan. Free cloud services such as Google Photos offer 15GB of storage before a subscription is required; Google One plans start at S$3.98 per month for 100GB as of mid-2026. Both Google Photos and Apple iCloud offer a dedicated Trash folder that retains deleted images for 30 or 60 days respectively, but only if the deletion was performed within the app itself rather than by a third-party cleaner operating at the file-system level.

Consumer advocacy group CASE has not yet issued specific guidance on duplicate-image software, though a spokesperson for the group confirmed to The Daily Singapore that digital consumer complaints have increased in the first half of 2026. Anyone who believes they have lost files to a faulty deletion may consult a data recovery specialist; several operate along Sim Lim Square on Rochor Canal Road, with basic hard-drive recovery starting around S$150 for a diagnostic assessment. For flash-memory devices, prices and outcomes vary widely. The most consistent advice from every technician contacted for this article: do not write any new data to the affected device, and seek help immediately.