Milan's Digital Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — And Officials Want Action Now

Milan's municipal digital infrastructure is carrying tens of thousands of duplicate images across public databases, and officials from the Comune di Milano's digital transformation office confirmed this week that the problem has reached a threshold they can no longer ignore. The redundant files are clogging servers, inflating storage costs, and — in some cases — feeding the wrong visuals into official communications for flagship projects tied to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics.

The issue sounds mundane. It is not. With the Games now fewer than six months away and the city's international profile at its highest point in years, the integrity of visual assets used in promotional campaigns, urban planning presentations, and press kits has become a genuine operational concern. The Comune's digital office estimates it is managing upward of 340 terabytes of image data spread across legacy systems, much of it duplicated two, three, or four times over. Storage costs alone have risen roughly 18 percent year-on-year since 2023, according to figures circulated internally and reviewed by The Daily Milan.

What the Experts Are Saying

Digital archivists at the Politecnico di Milano, whose design faculty on Via Golgi has been advising the city on asset management since early 2025, say the root cause is structural. Departments accumulated images independently for years — the planning office, the tourism board, the cultural heritage division — with no shared tagging protocol and no deduplication layer in place. When systems were partially consolidated during the 2022 Porta Nuova smart-city pilot, duplicate files migrated wholesale rather than being cleaned at source.

A senior technologist at Fondazione Feltrinelli, the research and cultural institution on Viale Pasubio 5, said the problem is far from unique to public bodies. Fashion and design companies operating out of the Porta Nuova district — where several major luxury brands have relocated European headquarters over the past three years — face the same sprawl inside their digital asset management platforms. She told The Daily Milan that one mid-sized fashion house she had consulted for discovered more than 60,000 exact or near-exact duplicate campaign images sitting across four separate internal servers, none of which were flagged by their existing software.

The technology itself to address this exists. AI-assisted deduplication tools using perceptual hashing — which compares images by visual fingerprint rather than file name — can process large libraries in days rather than months. Prices for enterprise-level solutions have dropped sharply; platforms that cost upward of €80,000 annually in 2021 are now available to public-sector clients for closer to €22,000 per year under collective procurement frameworks. The Comune di Milano is reportedly in discussions with at least two vendors, though no contract has been signed as of 4 July 2026.

The Pressure From Fashion and the Olympics

The convergence of Milan's two biggest near-term commercial pressures — the luxury sector's relentless output of visual content and the Olympic Games preparation — has given the issue political weight it previously lacked. Councillors in the centre-left administration of Mayor Beppe Sala have been briefed, and at least one member of the giunta comunale has raised the matter formally in the context of the Olympic readiness review sessions held monthly at Palazzo Marino.

The centre-right Regione Lombardia, which controls a parallel set of promotional databases for the Games, has separately flagged the same concern through its Lombardia Informatica subsidiary, the regional technology company headquartered in Via Torquato Taramelli. The two administrations, which have clashed repeatedly on housing and planning policy, appear to be in rare alignment on the need for a joint image governance protocol — though no formal agreement has yet been announced.

Archivists and IT procurement specialists consulted this week recommend that organisations in Milan start with a full audit of existing digital asset management systems before any vendor is brought in. Mapping where duplicates originate — which department, which upload workflow, which external agency — matters as much as the technical fix. For smaller cultural institutions and design studios in neighbourhoods like Isola and the Brera design district, open-source deduplication tools offer a workable starting point at no immediate cost. The window for getting systems clean before Olympic-season media demand peaks is closing. Most specialists put the practical deadline at October.