'My Story Keeps Getting Erased': SF Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement in City Archives

A City Hall digitization project meant to preserve San Francisco's historical photographic record has instead been quietly deleting irreplaceable neighborhood images — replacing them with duplicate files from wealthier, better-documented districts — according to community members who have spent months trying to get answers from the San Francisco Public Library's San Francisco History Center on Larkin Street.

The problem, which first surfaced in late spring when a Mission District-based oral history collective flagged the discrepancy, centers on an automated deduplication process used to compress the digital archive. The software flags visually similar images as redundant. When two photographs share enough pixel-level characteristics, the system retains one and marks the other for deletion. In practice, community members say, that has meant faded, lower-resolution images of working-class neighborhoods get dropped in favor of sharper, repeatedly scanned photographs of landmarks like Nob Hill mansions or the Ferry Building.

Tenderloin and Excelsior Residents Say Their Blocks Are Disappearing

Lorena Fuentes, who coordinates a community documentation effort through the Excelsior District's Mission Graduates nonprofit on Silver Avenue, described arriving at a planned archive session in April to find that a set of 1970s photographs of Ocean Avenue storefronts — submitted by longtime residents three years ago — had been replaced by a duplicate scan of a well-known 1906 earthquake image already held in multiple collections citywide. She is not a named city official, and her account has not been independently verified by the Library, but similar complaints have been submitted in writing to the History Center by at least two other community organizations, according to documents reviewed by this reporter.

In the Tenderloin, the Tenderloin Museum on Turk Street has been independently digitizing neighborhood photographs for several years specifically because staff there grew concerned that the city's central archive did not adequately represent the district. A staff member there, reached by phone, described the deduplication issue as consistent with longstanding gaps in how low-income neighborhood histories get catalogued — though the museum declined to comment on the specifics of the current dispute without more time to review the technical process involved.

The San Francisco History Center holds roughly 500,000 photographic items, a figure cited on the library's own public-facing collections page. Community members say the deduplication script, introduced as part of a broader digitization contract awarded in fiscal year 2024–2025, has not been publicly disclosed in any formal community notice or agenda item before the Library Commission.

What the City Says — and What Advocates Want Next

The San Francisco Public Library issued a brief statement in June acknowledging that its digital collections team was reviewing the deduplication workflow but did not confirm whether specific images had been permanently lost. The library did not respond to follow-up questions submitted by this reporter on June 30.

Advocates are now asking the Library Commission, which holds its next regular meeting in late July at the Main Library on Larkin Street, to place a moratorium on any further automated deletion until a community review panel can examine which images have been affected. A draft letter circulated among half a dozen Tenderloin and Excelsior community groups asks the commission to require the city to restore from raw backup any file deleted after January 1, 2025 — backups that the library's own vendor contract reportedly requires be kept for at least 18 months.

For residents who spent years collecting old Polaroids, church bulletins, and corner-store snapshots to submit to the public record, the bureaucratic pace is cold comfort. The photographs in question are not duplicates of anything else. They are, in many cases, the only visual evidence that a block, a face, or a Fourth of July block party in the Western Addition ever existed at all. Advocates say that if the commission does not act in July, they will bring the matter to the Board of Supervisors in August, citing the city's own Cultural Heritage Assets Ordinance as grounds for intervention.