Milan's Digital Archives Are Full of Duplicate Images — And It's Costing Residents More Than They Realise

Thousands of duplicate image files have accumulated across Milan's public-facing digital infrastructure, clogging municipal databases, slowing permit-processing portals, and driving up server costs that ultimately land on the city's technology budget. The problem, long treated as a back-office nuisance, is now drawing scrutiny from civic tech groups as the Comune di Milano prepares a broader digital-modernisation push ahead of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics this coming February.

The timing matters. With the Games less than eight months away, the city's online systems — from the tourism platform VisitMilano to the planning and building-permit portal used daily by architects and contractors around Porta Nuova — are under heavier load than at any point in the last decade. Redundant image storage compounds the strain. A single planning application for a residential renovation in the Navigli district can include dozens of attached photographs; duplicates of those files, created when documents are re-uploaded or migrated between systems, multiply the storage footprint without adding any informational value.

What Duplicate Images Actually Cost a City Like Milan

Storage is not free. Cloud infrastructure costs for public-sector entities in Italy have risen sharply since 2023, when the national Agency for Digital Italy — Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale, known as AgID — began pushing local authorities to migrate legacy systems onto certified cloud platforms. AgID's published migration guidelines require municipalities to audit existing data before transfer, yet many comuni, including several in Lombardy, have carried duplicate files wholesale into new environments, effectively paying twice to store the same image.

Estimates from the broader European municipal-IT sector — drawn from a 2024 report by the European Commission's Joinup open-source observatory — suggest that unmanaged duplicate data can account for between 20 and 35 percent of an organisation's total cloud storage bill. Apply even the lower end of that range to a city of Milan's scale and the figures become uncomfortable. The Comune di Milano's annual ICT budget, as reported in the city's 2025 balance sheet filed with the Corte dei Conti, sits in a range that makes unnecessary duplication a line item worth eliminating rather than tolerating.

For residents, the practical effects show up in response times. The Fascicolo del Fabbricato — the digital building dossier that homeowners in older districts like Isola and Brera are increasingly required to compile — depends on image-heavy uploads. When the underlying database is bloated with duplicates, retrieval slows, and the civil servants at the Sportello Unico per l'Edilizia on Via Pirelli who process those submissions face longer queue times. That delay cascades: a stalled building permit means a delayed renovation, a missed rental listing, a contractor's invoice that cannot be settled.

What the City and Residents Can Do Now

The Comune is not standing still. The digital-transformation team embedded within the Direzione Sistemi Informativi e Agenda Digitale has been piloting automated deduplication tools on archival photographic collections held at the Archivio Storico Civico in the Castello Sforzesco complex since early 2026. Early results from that pilot, referenced in internal communications circulated to city councillors in March, pointed to meaningful reductions in redundant file counts — though no finalised figures have been made public.

Civic coders connected to the Milano open-data community, which meets regularly at the co-working spaces around BASE Milano on Via Bergognone, have begun documenting duplication patterns in publicly downloadable datasets on the city's open-data portal, dati.comune.milano.it. Their work creates pressure on institutions to act before the Winter Olympics spotlight turns the city's digital performance into an international talking point.

For ordinary Milanesi, the actionable advice is modest but real: when submitting documents through municipal portals, compress and clearly label image files before upload, and avoid re-submitting identical attachments across multiple applications. The Sportello Unico per l'Edilizia has published guidance on its website recommending files no larger than 5MB per image. Following it reduces the chance that your submission contributes to the pile. The bigger fix, though, belongs to the institutions — and the Olympics deadline gives them less room than ever to postpone it.