Milan's Digital Archives Waste Millions on Duplicate Images

At least 34 percent of all digital image assets held by Milan's major cultural and commercial institutions are estimated to be exact or near-exact duplicates, according to a 2025 audit of digital asset management systems commissioned by the Comune di Milano's Direzione Sistemi Informativi. The finding landed quietly in a departmental report last November, but its implications are reverberating through the city's design studios, fashion archives, and Olympic preparation offices in 2026.

The timing matters. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Games opening ceremonies just weeks away, the Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 has been scrambling to consolidate visual documentation — competition venue photography, sponsor content, and public communications imagery — across a network of partner organisations. Duplicate images inflate storage costs, slow retrieval, and in several documented cases have caused the wrong version of an asset to be published publicly. For an event with a global broadcast audience, that is a risk no communications director wants to carry.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The Comune's November audit examined approximately 2.1 million image files held across seven city-linked bodies, including the Civiche Raccolte d'Arte at Palazzo Morando on Via Sant'Andrea and the digital infrastructure supporting the Porta Nuova district's smart-city management platform. Of those 2.1 million files, auditors flagged roughly 714,000 as duplicates — either bit-for-bit identical copies or perceptual duplicates identifiable through hash-comparison and pixel-similarity algorithms. Storage overhead from redundant files was calculated at approximately €180,000 per year across the seven organisations combined, based on enterprise cloud-storage pricing of around €0.023 per gigabyte per month.

In the fashion economy, the figures are even larger in scale. Milan hosts the global headquarters or major regional offices of more than 30 luxury and ready-to-wear brands, concentrated in the arc between Via Montenapoleone and the Navigli district. Industry analysts who study digital asset management — a sector that has grown rapidly since brands accelerated e-commerce after 2020 — estimate that a mid-sized fashion house with a catalogue of 500,000 product images typically carries a duplication rate of 28 to 41 percent. At standard enterprise DAM licensing and storage costs, that translates to wasted expenditure of between €90,000 and €220,000 annually per brand. Multiply that across a cluster of thirty-plus houses and the aggregate waste across the Milanese fashion economy runs into the tens of millions of euros each year.

The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, which coordinates the fashion week calendar from its offices near Piazza del Duomo, has been developing guidance on digital asset hygiene for member brands since early 2025. The initiative has taken on fresh urgency this year as several houses have migrated to new product information management systems ahead of European Union digital product passport requirements, which will mandate traceable, deduplicated image records for textile and luxury goods sold in the EU market from 2027 onward.

Why Deduplication Is Harder Than It Sounds

Raw deletion is not the answer. Archivists at institutions such as the Fondazione Prada on Largo Isarco have documented cases where two apparently identical image files carry different provenance metadata — one legally cleared for commercial use, one restricted to editorial. Delete the wrong one and the legal exposure can far exceed the storage saving. This is why the field of duplicate image replacement, rather than simple deletion, has matured into a discipline in its own right: the identified duplicate is not erased but replaced with a pointer to a single canonical master file, preserving version histories and rights metadata intact.

Software capable of this — tools using perceptual hashing, EXIF metadata cross-referencing, and AI-assisted similarity scoring — now costs between €8,000 and €45,000 per year for enterprise licences, depending on library size. For most institutions in Milan carrying six-figure storage waste, the return on investment is recoverable within six to eighteen months.

For city departments, fashion brands, and Olympic organisers alike, the practical next step is a formal deduplication audit before year-end. The EU's 2027 digital product passport deadline is a hard backstop. Organisations that start the process now, particularly those migrating to new DAM platforms, have the easiest path — retrofitting deduplication into a legacy system mid-operation is significantly more expensive than building it in at the point of migration.