As the city's cultural institutions and fashion houses race to clean up sprawling digital collections, the choices made in the next six months will define how Milan's visual heritage is managed for a generation.
Milan is sitting on a digital mess. Across the city's major cultural institutions, municipal archives, and the image libraries maintained by fashion and design organisations operating out of Porta Nuova and the Brera district, duplicate photographs and digitised assets have multiplied unchecked for more than a decade. The question of what replaces them — and who decides — is now urgent.
The pressure is real and it is coming from multiple directions at once. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games less than six months away, the Comune di Milano and its communications offices need clean, licensable image libraries ready for a global press corps. Simultaneously, the fashion economy — which underpins a substantial share of Lombardy's GDP — is pushing toward centralised digital asset management systems ahead of the February 2027 collections calendar. Institutions that have not resolved their duplicate image problems by autumn will face bottlenecks at precisely the wrong moment.
The duplication crisis is not unique to Milan, but the city's particular blend of public archives and private creative economy has made it especially acute. The Archivio Civico Fotografico, housed near the Castello Sforzesco, holds more than 700,000 digitised images accumulated through successive scanning projects since the early 2000s, each of which introduced its own naming conventions and metadata standards. When Fondazione Prada digitised its curatorial archive at its Largo Isarco venue in the southern Navigli area, it encountered a similar problem: images ingested from multiple external agencies over different contract periods, with no unified deduplication protocol applied at the point of entry.
The fashion sector adds another layer. Showrooms and press offices operating along Via Montenapoleone and through the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana have long relied on third-party image distribution platforms. Those platforms routinely deliver the same photograph under different file names, resolutions, and watermark variants. A single catwalk image from a September fashion week can exist in forty or more technically distinct versions within a single brand's local server before anyone notices.
Industry analysts tracking digital asset management adoption across European creative economies have noted that organisations with collections exceeding 500,000 assets face an average deduplication cost of between €40,000 and €120,000 depending on whether the work is done with proprietary software, open-source tools, or contracted specialists — figures that smaller institutions in Milan's civic network struggle to absorb in a single budget cycle.
Three choices are now in front of Milan's institutional decision-makers, and the window for getting them right is closing fast.
First: which images get replaced versus retired. Replacing a duplicate with a single canonical version sounds straightforward, but for archives with legal or historical significance — the Archivio Storico Comunale on Via Moneta holds photographic records tied to specific property and planning disputes — deleting what appears to be a duplicate can destroy a legally distinct version. Archivists and legal officers need to be in the same room before any bulk deletion proceeds.
Second: who controls the master record. In institutions where IT departments and curatorial teams have operated separately for years, agreeing on a single digital asset management platform is as much a governance question as a technical one. The Comune di Milano's ongoing digitisation partnership with institutions in the Sforza network will require a joint protocol, not a unilateral decision by any single directorate.
Third: what standard applies going forward. Adopting a recognised metadata framework — the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard is the most widely used in European press and cultural contexts — at the point of image ingestion would prevent the next round of duplication from accumulating. Several fashion houses on and around Corso Como have already moved to IPTC-compliant workflows for their press libraries. The civic institutions have not.
The Olimpiadi deadline concentrates the mind. If the relevant offices, archives, and private sector partners in Milan do not reach working agreements on replacement protocols by October 2026, they will be managing a chaotic image environment during the highest-profile international event the city has hosted in years. The technical fix is available. The organisational will to deploy it, across institutions that do not always talk to each other, is what needs to be decided now.
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Published by The Daily Milan
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