Milan Moves to Purge Duplicate Images From Its Digital Archives — But Rivals Are Moving Faster

Milan's major cultural and civic institutions are confronting a sprawling duplicate-image problem across their digital collections — tens of thousands of redundant photograph files clogging public databases, slowing searches and, in some cases, presenting contradictory metadata to international researchers. The push to address it has become urgent in 2026, as the city's profile rises ahead of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February.

The issue matters now because several of Milan's institutions are mid-way through ambitious digitisation drives. The Pinacoteca di Brera, on Via Brera in the Brera district, launched an expanded online catalogue in late 2024, uploading scanned works at scale. The Triennale Milano, on Viale Alemagna in Parco Sempione, simultaneously accelerated its design-archive project to coincide with Milan Design Week commitments. Both efforts ingested legacy image batches — some dating to early-2000s CD-ROM digitisation rounds — without a unified deduplication protocol. The result, according to digital archivists working across the sector, is overlapping files with inconsistent resolution tags and competing rights metadata.

What Milan Is Actually Doing About It

The city's response has been patchwork. The Comune di Milano's Culture Directorate introduced an internal image-governance working group in January 2026, tasked with producing a standardised ICSM (Image Catalogue and Standards Manual) by the end of the third quarter. The working group draws on expertise from the Politecnico di Milano's design faculty, which has been researching perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies near-identical images even when file names and formats differ. Perceptual hashing tools can flag duplicates with roughly 95 percent accuracy before a human curator makes a final call, according to published research from the Politecnico's Department of Design.

Porta Nuova's growing cluster of tech and creative-economy firms has also entered the conversation. Several startups based in the Isola neighbourhood, north of the Porta Nuova Varesine tower complex, have pitched AI-assisted deduplication services to civic bodies — though no public procurement contracts have been confirmed as of this week.

Progress, by most assessments, is slow. The ICSM working group's January-to-September timeline means any unified standard will not be operational before the Olympic torch arrives in the Lombardy region. That creates reputational risk: international journalists and broadcasters researching Milan stories will continue to pull duplicate or mislabelled images from public portals through the high-visibility winter period.

How Milan Compares to London, Amsterdam and Tokyo

Other cities have moved earlier and more decisively. The British Museum in London completed a full deduplication audit of its online collection — more than 1.9 million object records — in 2023, using a combination of perceptual hashing and manual curatorial review funded partly through a £4.2 million Collections Data Programme grant. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, whose open-access image policy has made it a benchmark for European institutions, adopted automated deduplication as a continuous background process integrated into its content management system, meaning new uploads are checked against existing records before they go live.

Tokyo's Tokyo National Museum finished a comparable project in fiscal year 2024, aligning its digitised holdings with Japan's national cultural-property database under a government mandate tied to Expo 2025 preparation. The common thread in all three cases: a single institutional mandate, a defined budget, and a hard deadline tied to an external event. Milan has the external event. The mandate and the budget are still taking shape.

For researchers, photographers and rights-holders dealing with Milan's collections in the meantime, the practical advice is straightforward: cross-reference any image pulled from Brera's or Triennale's public portals against the EUROPEANA aggregator database, which runs its own deduplication layer across European cultural heritage records. EUROPEANA flagged more than 340,000 potential duplicates from Italian institutions in its 2025 annual data-quality report — a figure that has prompted Italy's Ministry of Culture to add deduplication compliance to its 2026 digitisation grant criteria. Institutions that want funding after September will need to demonstrate clean, deduplicated catalogues. That deadline, more than any civic working group, may finally force the pace in Milan.