How Milan's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of the Same Image Twice — And Why It Took Years to Fix

Milan's public institutions are sitting on a sprawling mess of duplicated digital images — the same photographs, renderings and archival scans catalogued multiple times across incompatible systems — and a coordinated clean-up effort is now well underway after years of fragmented digitisation projects left the city's cultural and municipal databases riddled with redundancy. The problem did not arrive overnight.

Understanding why requires going back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when individual institutions — the Comune di Milano, the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Triennale Milano on Viale Alemagna, and later the Fondazione Prada near the Porta Romana rail yard — each launched their own digitisation drives, often funded by separate grants, using different metadata standards and proprietary software platforms. Nobody was talking to anybody else. A single photograph of Piazza del Duomo taken in 1953 might exist in four separate databases under four different file names, none of them linked.

How the Accumulation Happened

The Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics preparation accelerated the problem rather than solving it. Beginning in 2022, communications teams across the Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026, the Comune, and Regione Lombardia all drew on the same pools of archival imagery — aerial shots of the city, historical pictures of Cortina d'Ampezzo, brand photography of the Porta Nuova skyline — and each team ingested those assets into its own content management system. By the time the Games arrived, estimates from internal working groups suggested that some asset libraries contained duplication rates above 30 percent, meaning roughly one in three stored files was a copy of something already catalogued elsewhere in the same institution.

The fashion and design sector, where Milan holds a globally recognised commercial position, also contributed. The twice-yearly collections at venues around Via Montenapoleone and the Quadrilatero della Moda generated enormous volumes of photography, and the transition from film to digital — which accelerated sharply between 2005 and 2012 — meant that agencies, brands and institutional partners were dumping high-resolution files into shared drives with no consistent naming conventions. Versioning compounded the issue: a retouched image and its original might both be retained, filed under slightly different names, neither flagged as derivative.

The Push Toward a Common Standard

The turning point came in late 2024, when the Comune di Milano's Direzione Cultura published a working document proposing adoption of the IIIF — International Image Interoperability Framework — as a common standard across city-linked cultural institutions. The framework, already in use at major European archive networks, allows institutions to share canonical image identifiers so that a duplicate can be detected automatically when ingested into any participating system. By January 2026, the Triennale and the Civico Archivio Fotografico in Via Manzoni had both formally committed to the migration, according to publicly available institutional announcements.

The cost of inaction had become tangible. Storage is not cheap at scale: enterprise-grade archival storage for cultural institutions can run to several thousand euros per terabyte annually when licensing, redundancy and access infrastructure are factored in. For an institution holding hundreds of thousands of high-resolution files, eliminating even a 20 percent duplication rate represents a meaningful budget saving — money that, in the current climate of tension between the centre-left Comune and the centre-right Regione Lombardia over cultural funding allocations, carries genuine political weight.

The practical work of deduplication — running hash-matching algorithms across existing libraries, reconciling conflicting metadata, and deciding which version of a disputed file becomes the canonical record — is now being carried out in phases. Institutions that completed the first audit phase by the end of June 2026 are expected to begin active file deletion and cross-linking in the third quarter of this year. For photographers, archivists and communications professionals working with these collections, the immediate advice is straightforward: before submitting any new image asset to a city-linked institution, check whether a canonical version already exists in the IIIF-compliant catalogue. Submitting duplicates now will only extend the clean-up timeline — and the bill.