Milan Eliminates Thousands of Duplicate Images From Public Records First

Milan's Comune has been quietly running a deduplication programme across its digital urban heritage archive since late 2024, targeting tens of thousands of redundant images accumulated during the rapid digitisation drives that followed the Covid-19 lockdowns. The effort, coordinated through the city's Direzione Sistemi Informativi e Agenda Digitale, covers municipal photography stretching from planning records in Porta Nuova to architectural documentation along Corso Como — and officials say the backlog runs to more than 280,000 files requiring review.

The problem is not cosmetic. Duplicate images embedded in public planning databases and cultural heritage registers slow search systems, inflate cloud storage costs, and — most critically for a city hosting the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics this coming winter — create legal exposure when unlicensed or misattributed photographs circulate unchecked through official channels. With the Games less than six months away and global press scrutiny intensifying, the pressure to get digital records clean is real and deadline-driven.

How Milan Compares With Paris, Amsterdam and New York

The challenge is not unique to Milan, but the city's approach differs in meaningful ways from its European peers. Paris launched a comparable exercise through its Direction des Affaires Culturelles in 2023, focusing primarily on images held within the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Amsterdam's Stadsarchief followed suit in early 2025, deploying open-source perceptual hashing tools across a collection of roughly 180,000 digitised photographs. New York City's Department of Records and Information Services began a pilot deduplication sweep in Manhattan borough files in March 2025.

What distinguishes Milan is the integration of its deduplication work with a live planning environment. Because the city's Sportello Unico Edilizia — the single-window building permit office — feeds directly into the same image repository used by heritage inspectors, a duplicate or misidentified photograph can materially delay a construction sign-off. The Comune identified at least 40 permit cases in 2025 where duplicated imagery contributed to processing delays of between three and eight weeks, according to an internal audit summary published on the city's transparency portal in February 2026.

Amsterdam has tackled the technical problem more cheaply, using open-source software that cost the Stadsarchief less than €15,000 to implement. Milan, by contrast, contracted with a private technology provider and has budgeted approximately €340,000 across a two-year project window running to December 2026. The higher spend reflects the complexity of integrating deduplication across multiple live administrative systems rather than a static archive — but critics within the city council's opposition groups have questioned whether the contract procurement was competitive.

The Fashion Economy Adds a Layer of Complexity

Milan carries an extra complication that Paris shares but Amsterdam and New York largely do not: a dominant fashion and luxury sector that generates extraordinary volumes of branded imagery flowing into municipal trade-fair and event-permit databases. The Fiera Milano complex at Rho, northwest of the city, processes hundreds of thousands of images annually tied to events including Salone del Mobile and Milano Moda Donna. Many of these files end up duplicated or mis-catalogued within city-held records when event organisers submit documentation for permits or public-space approvals.

Fondazione Fiera Milano acknowledged the issue in its 2025 annual report, noting that it was working with the Comune on standardising image metadata to reduce duplication at source — a preventative approach that neither Amsterdam nor New York has yet formalised at the institutional level.

For residents and businesses dealing with the city administration, the practical message is straightforward. Anyone submitting planning applications or event-permit requests through the Comune's online Suap portal should ensure that any photographs attached to applications carry EXIF metadata intact and have not been re-saved or compressed in ways that strip file identifiers. Applications flagged as containing suspected duplicates are now being returned for re-submission rather than processed, a policy shift the Comune confirmed on its website in April 2026.

The deduplication audit is due to complete its first full pass by October 2026 — six weeks before the Winter Olympics torch relay is scheduled to pass through Piazza del Duomo. Whether the archive emerges clean by then will depend on how quickly the remaining 140,000-odd unreviewed files can be processed. The clock is running.