How Milan's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What It's Costing the City

Milan's public institutions are sitting on a problem they largely created themselves. Across city departments, cultural foundations, and the sprawling Milan-Cortina 2026 organising committee, digital image libraries have accumulated duplicate files on a scale that is now forcing a systematic cleanup — one that administrators and technology contractors are scrambling to complete before the Winter Olympics open in February.

The roots of the problem stretch back roughly a decade, to the period when Porta Nuova transformed from a construction site into the skyline-defining district it is today. Between 2012 and 2018, multiple agencies — the Comune di Milano, private developers, and the Milan Chamber of Commerce — were simultaneously photographing and archiving the same landmarks, events, and infrastructure projects with no shared protocol. Every team used its own folder structure, its own naming conventions, and its own cloud or on-premise storage. The result was predictable: the same aerial shot of the Bosco Verticale, or the same press image from a Salone del Mobile opening at the Fiera Milano in Rho, could exist in four or five separate institutional libraries at once.

A Problem That Compound Interest Made Worse

The issue did not stay confined to municipal archives. Milan's fashion and design economy runs on visual content. Showrooms along Via Montenapoleone, press offices at the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, and the digital teams behind events like Fuorisalone in the Brera Design District have each built independent image databases over the years. Industry estimates from the European Digital Media Observatory, published in its 2024 annual report, suggested that large creative-sector organisations across EU cities waste between 15 and 22 percent of digital storage capacity on duplicate or near-duplicate files. For organisations working at Milan's volume of fashion weeks, trade fairs, and now Olympic preparation, those percentages translate into tangible costs.

Storage is not free. Enterprise cloud contracts for institutions of the size of the Fondazione Fiera Milano or the Milan metropolitan authority typically run into six-figure euro sums annually, and redundant files drive those costs upward without delivering any informational value. The Milan-Cortina 2026 organising committee, headquartered in the former Palazzo delle Scintille space near Piazza Sempione, accelerated this reckoning when it began consolidating visual assets from dozens of partner bodies in 2025 ahead of broadcast and licensing deadlines.

The trigger for active remediation came in late 2025, when the organising committee's technology partners flagged that its media library contained more than 300,000 image files, a significant proportion of which were duplicates ingested from municipal tourism boards, regional sports federations, and the provincial government in Cortina d'Ampezzo. Clearing and cataloguing that library became a contractual prerequisite for licensing agreements with broadcast partners.

What the Cleanup Actually Involves

Duplicate image replacement — the process of identifying redundant files, selecting a canonical master version, replacing references to duplicates across all linked systems, and then deleting the surplus — is technically straightforward but administratively complex. For Milan, the complication is that image references are embedded in legacy content management systems, some of which were built before responsive web design was standard, including the older layers of the Comune di Milano's public-facing portal at comune.milano.it.

Technology teams are using perceptual hashing tools, which compare images mathematically rather than pixel-by-pixel, to flag near-duplicates that differ only in compression level or colour profile. The work is being carried out in phases, starting with the Olympic media library, then moving to the municipal tourism archive, and eventually to the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense's digitisation project on Via Brera, where scanned historical photographs represent a separate and more delicate deduplication challenge.

For organisations outside the public sector — the design studios of Zona Tortona, the press offices along Corso Como — the practical advice from digital asset management specialists is consistent: establish a single source of truth before ingesting new material, not after. The cost of retroactive cleanup, both in contractor hours and in the disruption to publishing workflows, is considerably higher than the cost of enforcing a naming and metadata standard from the outset. Milan's institutions are learning that lesson at Olympic scale, and with an opening ceremony deadline that will not move.