All news coverage from Chicago.
Community members across Pilsen, Englewood, and the Near West Side say repeated, mismatched photos in city planning databases are distorting the record of who lives where — and what their blocks actually look like.
City officials and neighborhood groups face a tangle of key decisions as the Department of Buildings moves to clean up a records problem that has quietly slowed permit approvals across dozens of wards.
Thousands of redundant photos are clogging municipal databases, costing taxpayers money and slowing the agencies that depend on clean data to do their jobs.
Across neighborhoods from Pilsen to Pullman, community members say a wave of duplicate-image purges from local digital archives and public murals databases has quietly stripped away irreplaceable visual records.
Years of patchwork database mergers and underfunded IT contracts left thousands of Chicago building records tied to the wrong photographs, creating headaches for inspectors, buyers, and aldermen alike.
Homeowners and renters across Chicago's South and West sides say duplicate image errors on city databases and listing platforms have cost them money, confused buyers, and in some cases threatened their housing stability.
City officials and community arts organizations spent this week auditing hundreds of publicly funded murals after a database error caused the same reference photographs to be used in multiple separate projects across at least three neighborhoods.
City agencies and community groups are being forced to confront a backlog of redundant, mislabeled, and duplicated photographs in public archives — and the choices made now will shape how Chicago's visual history gets told for decades.
Across Chicago neighbourhoods, residents and community groups say their photos and likenesses are being swapped out in digital platforms and city-facing systems — and they want answers.
From city permit portals to Chicago Public Schools databases, redundant and misidentified photos are clogging public systems — and the people responsible for fixing it are finally talking.
When city and county databases publish the same property photos, outdated images, or duplicated records, the consequences for homeowners, renters, and small businesses can be severe.
As cities from Berlin to São Paulo grapple with redundant public art imagery, Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs has built one of the few formal review pipelines in the world.
A growing number of Chicagoans say clerical and digital errors have swapped their identity documents, property photos, and benefit records with other people's images — and getting the city to fix it can take months.
City agencies and community groups accelerated efforts to audit and swap out repeated imagery across Chicago's murals, signage, and digital displays ahead of a mid-July deadline.
From Pilsen murals to Lincoln Square storefronts, stale and duplicated images in city databases and online platforms are creating real confusion — and real consequences — for Chicago neighborhoods.
The city's Department of Transportation confirmed this week that a sweeping audit of duplicated and mismatched street signage across Chicago's grid is now underway.
A closer look at the metrics driving the duplicate image replacement trend in Chicago's digital landscape
A quiet but costly data management failure inside Chicago's public records systems is creating headaches for homeowners, small businesses, and city staff from Logan Square to the South Shore.