Milan Moves to Purge Duplicate Images From Its Public Record — But Rivals Are Moving Faster

Milan's municipal archive holds more than 1.4 million digital images spanning a century of city life, and a growing number of them appear more than once. Some are mislabelled. Some appear in triplicate across separate departmental databases. The problem is neither new nor unique, but a push by civic technology advocates and archivists at the Civico Archivio Fotografico in Via Andegari is forcing it onto the agenda at a moment when the city can least afford the distraction — with the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics now months away and international scrutiny at a peak.

The issue matters now for a specific reason. As Milan prepares to project its image to a global audience, the risk of duplicate or doctored imagery appearing in official communications, tourism portals, and press packs has moved from a bureaucratic nuisance to a reputational exposure. The city's visual identity — used in everything from Comune di Milano promotional material to the design-week catalogues issued by the Triennale — depends on a clean, verified image library. Across European peer cities, that process is already well advanced. Milan is catching up.

Where Milan Stands — and Where It Lags

The Civico Archivio Fotografico has been running a de-duplication pilot since January 2026, using perceptual hashing software to flag near-identical images across its collections. The pilot covers roughly 180,000 images from the post-war urban reconstruction period. Staff have flagged thousands of potential duplicates but the review process — requiring human sign-off on each batch — is slow. No automated deletion is permitted under the archive's own protocols.

Contrast that with Amsterdam's Stadsarchief, which completed a comparable de-duplication sweep of its entire digitised collection of approximately 800,000 images by the end of 2024 using a hybrid AI-and-curator model. Or with Barcelona's Institut de Cultura, which integrated duplicate-detection tools directly into its content management system in 2023, so new uploads are screened before they enter the archive. Milan has neither of those integrations in place yet.

The Porta Nuova district — rebranded and photographed relentlessly since the Unicredit Tower opened in 2012 — illustrates the local version of the problem in miniature. Dozens of nearly identical aerial shots of the Bosco Verticale and the Piazza Gae Aulenti appear across the Comune's tourism database, the Triennale's digital library, and the press portals of at least three private developers. Cross-referencing them manually is, by any measure, impractical.

What Other Cities Are Doing Differently

The gap is most visible when you look at cities that treated their visual archives as infrastructure rather than administration. Berlin's Landesarchiv began a full metadata harmonisation project in 2022, allocating €2.3 million over three years to ensure that images stored across 14 separate municipal departments could be cross-searched without duplication. The project was complete by March 2025.

Milan's current allocation for digital archive management — drawn from the broader Cultura e Musei budget line — has not been published as a standalone figure. The Civico Archivio Fotografico, which operates under the Comune di Milano's cultural directorate, has historically relied on European Union co-funding for digitisation projects. Whether the Olympics preparation window accelerates a budget commitment is a question that archivists in Via Andegari are watching closely.

For the fashion and design economy — where image rights and authenticity are commercially sensitive — the stakes extend beyond civic record-keeping. Studios based in the Navigli area and showrooms along Via Montenapoleone routinely license images from municipal collections for editorial use. A mislabelled or duplicated image entering a licensed workflow creates legal exposure, not just confusion.

The practical path forward, according to the broader European archival consensus, requires three steps: a single content management platform shared across departments, automated hashing at the point of upload, and a clear legal framework for deletion rather than simple archival flagging. Milan has begun work on the first. The second and third remain unresolved. With the Olympic opening ceremony scheduled for February 2026, the window to get this right is shorter than the archive's backlog suggests it needs to be.