Milan's Digital Archivists Are Winning the War on Duplicate Images — Here's How They Stack Up Against Paris and New York

Milan's major cultural and commercial institutions have quietly built one of Europe's more sophisticated responses to a problem that plagues every image-heavy organisation: the runaway proliferation of duplicate digital assets. The city's fashion economy, which accounts for a significant share of Lombardy's export revenue, generates millions of product images annually. Managing that volume without redundancy has become a genuine competitive concern.

The problem surfaced publicly at the beginning of 2025, when several Milan-based fashion houses — competing for storage infrastructure ahead of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics media rollout — began reporting that their digital asset management systems held duplicate image rates of between 30 and 45 percent of total stored files. That figure, cited in a February 2025 report by the Politecnico di Milano's Design and Innovation Lab, put the city's creative sector on notice.

What Milan Is Actually Doing

The most visible institutional response has come from the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo, which manages the Cathedral's extensive photographic and architectural archive. The organisation began a systematic deduplication programme in autumn 2024, partnering with a Milanese software firm based in the Tortona design district to audit roughly 2.3 million stored image files. By March 2026, the project had reduced redundant storage by an estimated 38 percent, freeing capacity that the archive now uses for higher-resolution digitisation of medieval stonework drawings.

In Porta Nuova — the glass-and-steel quarter north of Garibaldi station that has become the city's de facto hub for tech and finance — the picture is different again. Several multinational tenants running regional headquarters there have adopted cloud-native deduplication tools from vendors including Adobe Experience Manager and Bynder, both of which now maintain Italian sales operations in the district. The appeal is straightforward: a single fashion label shooting four seasonal collections per year can accumulate upwards of 80,000 raw image files annually before any culling takes place.

The Brera Pinacoteca, meanwhile, has integrated duplicate-detection algorithms into its ongoing digitalisation project, a collaboration with the Ministry of Culture that formally launched in January 2026. The gallery's digital collections team cross-references new scans against existing holdings using perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually near-identical images even when file formats or resolutions differ.

How Milan Compares to Paris and New York

Paris presents the clearest point of comparison. The Bibliothèque nationale de France completed a large-scale deduplication exercise across its Gallica digital platform in 2023, reducing its image library by approximately 22 percent — a lower rate than what the Veneranda Fabbrica achieved, though the BnF's archive is vastly larger and older. The Louvre's digital team, by contrast, has been criticised within French archival circles for slower adoption of automated deduplication, relying instead on manual curatorial review for much of its collection.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art moved aggressively in 2024 to implement hash-based deduplication across its Open Access collection of more than 490,000 public-domain images. The Met's technology team estimated a storage cost saving of around $200,000 annually after removing near-duplicate and reformatted versions of the same artworks. That figure has become something of a benchmark for institutions elsewhere making the business case to boards and funders.

Milan's fashion sector, which operates on tighter commercial timelines than any museum, has arguably pushed harder and faster than either city's cultural institutions. The practical driver is the Olympic media calendar: broadcasters and sponsors attached to Milan-Cortina 2026 require licensors to deliver clean, deduplicated image libraries by contractual deadlines, some of which fall as early as September 2026.

For organisations still wrestling with the issue, the Politecnico di Milano's Design and Innovation Lab is running a series of technical workshops through autumn 2026, open to registered cultural institutions and design firms. The sessions, held at the Leonardo campus on Via Golgi, cover both the technical implementation of perceptual hashing and the governance frameworks needed to stop duplicate accumulation from restarting the moment a new collection cycle begins. Registration opened on 1 July 2026, with the first session scheduled for 22 September.