How Milan's Digital Archives Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Milan's public cultural institutions are sitting on hundreds of thousands of duplicate digital images — the accumulated debris of more than two decades of piecemeal digitisation efforts that were never coordinated, never standardised, and, in several cases, never finished. The problem is not new, but the pressure to fix it has sharpened considerably as the city prepares to host the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and the global scrutiny that brings to every corner of its civic infrastructure, including its digital one.

The scale of the redundancy problem matters now because Milan is in the middle of spending public money on a new unified digital heritage portal — a project overseen by the Comune di Milano and linked to the broader Cultura Digitale programme that city hall launched in 2023. Pouring new resources into a platform still haunted by duplicate, mis-tagged and low-resolution legacy files would undermine the entire investment before the first user logs on.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem go back to roughly 2001, when individual institutions — the Pinacoteca di Brera on Via Brera, the Museo del Novecento at Piazza del Duomo, the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense — each began their own scanning programmes using different software, different resolution standards and different metadata schemas. Nobody was talking to anybody else. A painting photographed for a Brera catalogue in 2004 might also have been scanned for a Braidense exhibition guide in 2008 and then re-photographed for a Comune social media campaign in 2019. Three files, three different filenames, no shared identifier, all living in separate servers.

The problem compounded after 2015, when smartphone-quality photography made it trivially easy for staff across multiple departments to upload their own images of civic assets — from the iron columns of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II to the mosaics inside the Duomo — directly into shared drives with zero curation. By 2022, internal audits at two Comune-linked institutions found that between 30 and 40 percent of their image libraries consisted of files that were functionally identical to something already stored elsewhere in the same system, according to information that circulated at a 2023 sector working group in Milan. Those figures have not been independently published.

Digitisation consultants working across European municipal archives — including projects in Bologna and Turin — have consistently flagged the same pattern: each wave of digitisation funding produces more files than the last, but cleaning protocols are almost never written into project contracts. Milan followed that template faithfully.

The Current Push for a Fix

The practical response began taking shape in late 2024, when the Comune di Milano signed a framework agreement with a consortium of technology partners to develop a centralised Digital Asset Management system capable of running automated de-duplication algorithms across participating institutions. Fondazione Palazzo Reale, which oversees the Palazzo Reale exhibition space on Piazza del Duomo, was among the first to pilot the new intake protocol, freezing all new image uploads pending a full library audit.

The de-duplication process itself is not simply a matter of deleting obvious copies. Many duplicate images exist because different versions — a cropped detail, a colour-corrected master, a web-compressed derivative — all carry legitimate use cases. The technical challenge is building a taxonomy that distinguishes a genuine duplicate from a purposeful variant, and doing it at scale across archives that collectively hold millions of assets.

For institutions along the Porta Nuova corridor, where several design and fashion houses maintain their own digital asset libraries under agreements with the Comune for publicly funded exhibition spaces, the question of who owns the cleaned archive — and who pays for the cleaning — remains unresolved. The fashion economy's relationship with image rights is notoriously complex, and any de-duplication project that inadvertently deletes a licensed variant risks triggering contractual disputes.

The practical timeline calls for the core de-duplication sweep across Comune-linked institutions to be completed before the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Games, which begins in February 2026 — leaving a narrow window. Institutions that have not yet begun their internal audits should treat the remainder of this year as their last realistic opportunity to do so before the unified portal goes live and the backlog becomes everyone's public problem.