Milan's Digital Archives Are Full of Duplicate Images — Here's What Officials and Experts Say Should Happen Next

Milan's public institutions are sitting on a problem that sounds mundane but carries serious financial and legal weight: hundreds of thousands of duplicate digital images clogging archival systems, slowing procurement workflows, and inflating storage costs at precisely the moment the city cannot afford inefficiency. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics now months away, administrators across the city are under mounting pressure to act.

The issue gained renewed urgency this spring after the Comune di Milano's digital infrastructure directorate began auditing assets tied to the Olympic communications campaign. Internal reviews — confirmed in public procurement notices posted to the city's transparency portal — revealed that the same photographic files had been uploaded, tagged, and licensed multiple times across different departments, creating redundancy that legal and copyright officers say exposes the municipality to invoicing disputes with agencies and photographers.

What the Experts Are Saying

Digital asset management specialists in Lombardy point to a structural gap. Institutions that grew their image libraries quickly during the post-pandemic push to digitise collections — a drive funded in part by the PNRR, Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which allocated roughly €46 million toward cultural digitisation by 2025 — often skipped the deduplication step entirely. The Pinacoteca di Brera on Via Brera undertook a major digitisation drive for its 38,000-piece permanent collection, and archivists there have publicly acknowledged the challenge of managing derivative files: crops, resolution variants, and colour-corrected versions of the same master image, each stored as a separate record.

Tecnologie per i Beni Culturali, a consortium of tech firms operating out of the Bovisa district, has been advising several Milanese institutions on adopting perceptual hashing tools — software that identifies near-duplicate images even when metadata differs. Consortium representatives have stated at industry events this year that the average large Italian cultural institution carries a duplication rate of between 18 and 30 percent in its unmanaged digital archives. For a city running simultaneous branding campaigns for fashion week, Olympic sponsors, and municipal tourism, that figure translates directly into wasted licensing budget.

The Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 is not commenting publicly on its internal asset management protocols. But procurement documents published on the foundation's website show that its creative production contract, awarded in late 2025, includes explicit clauses requiring the appointed agency to deliver a single-master image library with deduplication certified before January 31, 2026 — a deadline the foundation says was met.

The Local Dimension: Fashion, Design, and Olympic Pressure

Milan's position as a global leader in fashion and design makes the stakes higher than they might be elsewhere. Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, headquartered near Via Montenapoleone, manages image rights for dozens of brands and has pushed for industry-wide adoption of the GS1 Digital Link standard, which assigns unique persistent identifiers to image assets and makes duplication far easier to detect. Representatives of the organisation have spoken at Salone del Mobile events in favour of standardisation, noting that rights disputes over duplicate or re-uploaded images cost the sector significant legal fees each year — though the organisation has not published a precise annual figure.

The Porta Nuova district, home to the headquarters of several international design and media firms, has become something of a testing ground. At least two agencies operating out of the UniCredit Tower complex have piloted AI-assisted duplicate detection tools since January 2026, using them to audit client image banks before submitting them to brand registries.

For institutions that have not yet acted, the practical advice from specialists is consistent: start with a metadata audit before touching any files, use hashing tools rather than filename comparisons, and establish a single repository with version control before the next major event cycle. For Milan, that next cycle — the Games opening in February 2027 in Cortina — is close enough to make delay genuinely costly. Archivists, rights officers, and tech vendors all agree on one point: the longer duplicates sit unaddressed, the more expensive the cleanup becomes.