Milan's War on Duplicate Images: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Paris and New York

Milan's municipal digital office confirmed this spring that duplicate and replicated images now account for roughly 34 percent of all visual content flagged across the city's public-facing digital infrastructure — a figure that has forced the comune to revisit how it manages everything from tourism promotion materials to the visual records underpinning the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics communications campaign.

The problem is not abstract. With the Games now months away, the Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 is coordinating an unprecedented volume of photographic and video assets across dozens of partner institutions. Image duplication — where the same photograph appears under different metadata tags, often with conflicting licensing rights — has created costly clearance bottlenecks that risk delaying official publications and sponsor deliverables. Digital asset managers working on the Games have reportedly tripled their verification workloads since January.

What Milan Is Doing — And Where It's Falling Short

The city's most visible effort sits inside the Porta Nuova district, where the Comune di Milano's smart-city pilot programme has been running an AI-assisted deduplication tool since November 2024. The system, integrated with the city's open-data portal on Via Larga, cross-references image hashes across municipal databases and flags near-identical files before they are published to public channels. Officials say the tool has processed more than 1.2 million image files to date.

The fashion sector is a separate but equally urgent front. The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, headquartered near Piazza della Repubblica, has been pushing member houses since 2023 to adopt standardised digital asset management protocols. The concern is practical: counterfeit product imagery — often slight alterations of authentic runway photographs — circulates across secondary e-commerce platforms and undercuts brand integrity. Several houses along Via Montenapoleone now require that every image used in digital marketing carry a cryptographic watermark registered with a central industry ledger, though adoption remains uneven among smaller labels.

Compare this with London, where the Greater London Authority embedded deduplication requirements into its digital procurement rules in early 2024, mandating that any public-sector image library above 10,000 files undergo quarterly deduplication audits. Paris's Direction de la Communication de la Mairie de Paris went further, appointing a dedicated image rights officer in March 2025 to oversee the city's 2.4-million-asset visual archive. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art set a widely cited benchmark in 2023 when it eliminated approximately 18,000 duplicate entries from its public-domain digital collection in a single six-month project, reducing storage costs and improving search accuracy measurably.

The Stakes for a Design Capital

Milan's identity as a global design and fashion capital makes this more than a bureaucratic housekeeping issue. The Salone del Mobile, which drew 370,500 visitors to the Fiera Milano complex in Rho this past April, generates an estimated 80,000 press and promotional images in a single week. Without robust deduplication, identical images licensed under different terms create liability exposure for exhibitors, publications and the fair itself.

The broader data picture reinforces the urgency. Research published by the European Audiovisual Observatory in 2025 found that image duplication inflates digital storage costs for European cultural institutions by an average of 22 percent annually. For a city running Olympic-scale communications on a fixed budget, that is not a trivial number.

Milan is not losing this battle, but it is not winning it convincingly either. The Porta Nuova pilot is promising, and the Camera Nazionale della Moda's ledger initiative is among the more sophisticated industry-level responses anywhere in Europe. But neither effort covers the full landscape of the city's digital image problem. Smaller civic institutions — neighbourhood libraries, local museums in the Navigli district, community sports organisations managing Olympic volunteer recruitment imagery — largely operate without any deduplication protocol at all.

The Comune's digital office has indicated that a citywide policy framework is expected before the end of 2026. Organisations that want to get ahead of it should audit their image libraries now, register assets with established metadata standards such as IPTC Core, and cross-check holdings against the city's open-data portal tools already available on Via Larga. The window to sort this out before the Olympic spotlight arrives is narrowing fast.