Milan's Digital Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — And Residents Are Paying the Price

Thousands of duplicate image files have accumulated inside the Comune di Milano's public-facing digital infrastructure, creating bottlenecks that affect everything from planning permit applications in Porta Nuova to cultural event listings on the city's official civic portal, according to a technical audit circulated internally this spring.

The problem sounds mundane. It isn't. When the same image — a construction rendering, a neighbourhood map, a heritage photograph — exists in dozens of unlinked copies across different departmental servers, staff waste time locating the correct version, systems slow under redundant load, and citizens waiting on responses from municipal offices wait longer than they should. In a city gearing up to co-host the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics this coming February, that latency carries real consequences.

How Duplication Accumulates — and Where It Hurts Most

The issue is structural. Milan's municipal government operates across dozens of semi-autonomous departments, each maintaining its own content management workflows. The urban planning office in Via Pirelli, the cultural affairs directorate covering spaces like the Triennale Milano in Viale Alemagna, and the tourism promotion unit feeding content to YesMilano have historically uploaded assets independently, with no central deduplication protocol in place. A single aerial photograph of the Navigli canal district, for example, might live in fifteen separate folders across three departments — each a slightly different file size, none tagged consistently.

Libraries and civic memory institutions face a parallel challenge. The Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense on Via Brera has been digitising historical collections since 2018, and archivists there have flagged that without systematic duplicate-image replacement protocols, storage costs compound year on year while catalogue search results return cluttered, inconsistent results for researchers and the public alike.

For ordinary residents, the friction shows up in specific, irritating ways. Homeowners in Isola or the Porta Venezia neighbourhood submitting renovation applications through the Comune's SUAP online portal have reported encountering outdated floor-plan images attached to their building's records — old duplicates that were never retired when updated drawings were filed. Clearing those errors requires manual intervention from staff, adding days to processing times.

The Cost of Doing Nothing — and What the City Plans to Do

Storage is not free. Cloud infrastructure costs for Italian public administrations have risen sharply since 2023, when the national digitisation agency AGID mandated migration toward certified cloud environments under the Piano Triennale per l'Informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione. Municipalities carrying inflated digital asset libraries — bloated by years of duplicate uploads — face higher annual licensing fees for storage tiers than leaner, well-maintained systems would require. The gap runs to tens of thousands of euros annually for a city the size of Milan, though the Comune has not published a specific figure for its own estate.

The Comune di Milano confirmed in its 2025 digital transformation roadmap — published on the institutional website in December — that asset management reform is among the priorities ahead of the Olympics period. The roadmap references adoption of a centralised Digital Asset Management platform, though no vendor has been publicly named and no go-live date before the February 2026 Games has been formally announced.

Private-sector comparisons are instructive. Milan's fashion and design industry — anchored along Via Montenapoleone and through institutions like the Politecnico di Milano's design faculty — has run sophisticated DAM systems for years, precisely because duplicate product imagery costs money in e-commerce and brand publishing. The public sector is catching up slowly.

For residents, the practical advice is straightforward: when submitting any document or image through Comune portals, use the most current official file name convention listed in the portal's guidance notes, and flag any pre-loaded images that appear outdated directly to the relevant sportello. It is a workaround, not a solution — but until the city's deduplication project reaches completion, it is the fastest way to keep your application moving.