How Milan's Visual Archive Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Milan's municipal digital archive now holds an estimated 2.3 million photographs, graphic assets and promotional images spread across at least seven separate content management systems — and nobody is quite sure how many of those files are exact or near-exact duplicates. That question, quietly urgent for years, has moved to the top of the agenda at Palazzo Marino as the city accelerates preparations for the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and faces the cost of maintaining an increasingly bloated visual infrastructure.

The problem did not arrive overnight. It accumulated across roughly fifteen years of uncoordinated digitisation drives, each one launched by a different municipal department or cultural body with its own software, storage contract and naming conventions. Every project deposited its own photographic record into a silo, and those silos rarely talked to one another.

Three Initiatives That Built the Backlog

The Brera district was one of the earliest flashpoints. When the Pinacoteca di Brera began its large-scale digitisation programme in the early 2010s, high-resolution scans of artworks were uploaded to a dedicated server managed by the ministry's regional directorate. Separately, the Milan city council's Cultura Milano portal — launched in 2014 to aggregate events and venues — started pulling in promotional imagery from partner institutions, including many of the same Pinacoteca assets, re-compressed and re-tagged. By 2018 the same Raphael cartoon was sitting, in slightly different file sizes, in four distinct folders across two different platforms.

The Porta Nuova development compound added a second wave. From 2012 onwards, Coima — the real-estate group behind the Bosco Verticale towers and the Piazza Gae Aulenti redesign — supplied thousands of architectural photographs to the city's press office, to the Milan Urban Center exhibition space on Via Lepetit, and to the regional tourism board Explora. Each recipient resized and renamed the originals for its own templates. When Explora merged several of its digital channels in 2022, internal reviews found the Porta Nuova image set replicated across six separate folders, totalling almost 14 gigabytes of essentially identical content.

The fashion economy complicated things further. The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, which coordinates the twice-yearly Milano Moda Donna calendar from its offices near Corso Venezia, has supplied runway imagery to municipal promotional channels since at least 2016. Each season's pictures arrived from different photographers' agencies, often with overlapping coverage of the same shows. Press attachés at the comune downloaded whatever they needed, and institutional memory of what had already been stored was almost nonexistent.

Why the Olympic Countdown Changed the Calculation

The practical cost remained manageable so long as storage was cheap. Cloud rates changed that arithmetic. Between 2021 and 2025, the city's annual bill for external cloud storage of media assets rose by roughly 40 percent, according to the draft budget documents presented to the city council's digital committee in March 2026. The Olympics deadline imposed a harder discipline: the communications office responsible for promoting Milan-Cortina 2026 needed a single, fast, reliable image library that external partners — broadcasters, sponsors, the International Olympic Committee's own content team — could access without wading through redundant files.

The city contracted a Milanese technology firm in late 2025 to run a deduplication audit across the primary archive systems. Early results, circulated to the digital committee in May 2026, suggested that between 30 and 35 percent of stored image files were duplicates or near-duplicates by pixel hash — a figure that surprised even officials who had suspected the problem was serious. The audit is expected to conclude by the end of September 2026, with a consolidated archive targeted for December — just ahead of the February 2026 Games opening ceremony in Cortina d'Ampezzo.

For organisations outside Palazzo Marino dealing with the same issue — cultural institutions along Via Brera, smaller design studios in the Tortona district, the trade-fair complex at Fiera Milano in Rho — the city's experience offers a clear lesson: every round of digitisation that skips a shared taxonomy creates a future cleanup bill. The tools for automated deduplication are now mature and relatively affordable, but deploying them retroactively is always more expensive than building the right architecture from the start. The time to sort the filing system is before the cameras start rolling, not after.