Milan Officials Launch Initiative to Eliminate Duplicate Images From Archives

Milan's cultural and commercial institutions are sitting on a problem they have largely avoided discussing in public: tens of thousands of duplicate, mislabelled, or corrupted images clogging the digital archives that support everything from Olympic venue promotion to luxury-brand press releases. With the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Games now less than seven months away, the pressure to clean up these systems has become acute.

The issue surfaced publicly this spring when the Comune di Milano's civic communications office acknowledged, during a council committee session in late April, that its photographic catalogue for public monuments and heritage sites, used by journalists, tourism boards and event planners, contained significant redundancy. No official figure has been released, but archivists familiar with the system say the problem is substantial enough to delay image delivery requests by several working days.

Why the Olympics Are Forcing the Conversation

The Milan-Cortina 2026 Organising Committee, known as Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026, has been assembling a centralised media library for accredited press use ahead of the February games. That process has exposed how fragmented image ownership and storage standards remain across Lombardy's public and private institutions. Venue photography shot at PalaItalia Santa Giulia and the Mediolanum Forum in Assago, for example, has been managed by separate contractors using incompatible file-naming conventions, according to procurement documents reviewed by this newspaper.

Digital asset specialists working with Milan's fashion and design sector say the problem is not confined to the public sphere. The concentration of luxury-house headquarters in the Quadrilatero della Moda, along Via Montenapoleone and the surrounding streets, means that image duplication carries direct commercial costs. Agencies responsible for press libraries for multiple brands describe scenario where a single runway photograph can exist in dozens of cropped, recoloured, or reformatted versions across shared servers, each tagged differently, making rights clearance a legal minefield.

The Politecnico di Milano's Design department, which has published research on digital asset management for the creative industries, has been cited in at least two Comune working papers as a reference point for best-practice frameworks. The university's Bovisa campus has hosted workshops this year examining metadata standardisation, a technical fix that most archivists agree is foundational to any deduplication effort.

What a Fix Would Actually Require

Experts in digital preservation point to three concrete steps that Milan's institutions have so far resisted committing to in writing: adopting a shared metadata schema, appointing a designated digital asset officer within major public bodies, and allocating budget for retrospective database cleaning. The last item is the sticking point. Retroactive deduplication projects in comparable European cities have cost upward of €200,000 for mid-sized institutional archives, a figure that makes finance committees cautious.

The Triennale di Milano, which maintains one of the city's most significant design image collections, has been working since January 2025 on a phased digitisation project under its archive modernisation programme. Staff there have described the deduplication element as the most labour-intensive component, requiring human review of algorithmically flagged matches because automated tools alone cannot reliably distinguish between a duplicate and a deliberately preserved variant.

For commercial operators, the calculus is different but equally pressing. Brands in the Brera Design District preparing materials for Salone del Mobile 2027 are already commissioning audits of their image libraries to avoid the kind of rights disputes that surfaced during last year's edition. Digital asset consultancies based in the Isola neighbourhood report a marked uptick in enquiries since January, with project timelines typically running four to six months for a library of 50,000 assets.

The most immediate deadline remains the Winter Olympics. Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 is expected to open its full media portal to accredited journalists in September, and the quality of that system will effectively serve as a public benchmark for how well Milan's institutions have managed their digital infrastructure. Officials have not yet confirmed whether a unified deduplication protocol will be in place before that launch date. Organisations holding relevant image archives are being urged by the Fondazione to submit clean, non-duplicate files in TIFF or high-resolution JPEG format with IPTC metadata embedded before the end of August.