Milan Leads European Push to Purge Duplicate Images from Public Records — But Other Cities Are Catching Up Fast

Milan's Comune confirmed this week that its three-year digital archive remediation programme has flagged and removed more than 840,000 duplicate images from public planning, heritage and municipal records since January 2024 — a figure that puts it ahead of most comparable European cities, but well short of where administrators say it needs to be before the Winter Olympics open in February 2026.

The push matters because duplicated imagery in civic databases is not a minor housekeeping problem. It skews property valuations when assessors pull building photos for the Agenzia delle Entrate, it clogs the permit pipelines that construction firms need to move fast in redevelopment zones like Porta Nuova and the Scalo di Porta Romana, and it creates legal exposure when heritage protection orders are attached to the wrong version of an archived photograph. With Milan-Cortina already generating a surge of infrastructure documentation, the window to get this right is closing.

The Comune's Direzione Sistemi Informativi, based in Via Larga, has been running a deduplication pipeline built partly on open-source tooling and partly on a contract awarded in March 2025 to a Bologna-based data engineering firm. The city's cultural institutions are separately engaged: the Pinacoteca di Brera launched its own image-integrity audit in September 2025, covering roughly 120,000 digitised works in its internal catalogue, after a spot check found that nearly 12 percent of thumbnails in one collection were either duplicated or mislabelled.

How Milan Compares

London's equivalent effort, run through the Greater London Authority's digital services unit, began earlier — pilots started in 2022 — but has been hampered by the fragmented nature of London's 33 borough councils, each maintaining separate image repositories with no shared deduplication standard. Paris, under the Direction des Affaires Culturelles de la Ville de Paris, launched a centralised image registry in 2023 that now covers municipal museums and planning records, and officials there say their error rate has dropped to under 4 percent. Barcelona's Institut Municipal d'Informàtica reported in April 2026 that it had cleared duplicates from 95 percent of its urban planning photo archive — the benchmark Milan's own technicians privately cite as the one to beat.

The practical stakes are sharpest in the fashion and design economy. Showrooms and brand offices concentrated along Via Montenapoleone and in the Tortona district file hundreds of planning and commercial-space permit applications annually with the Comune. When the same reference photograph of a building facade appears under two different cadastral codes, it can stall a permit for weeks. The Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana flagged exactly this problem in a March 2026 position paper submitted to the city, estimating that duplicated imagery in permit files added an average of 23 days to commercial renovation approvals in the central fashion quadrilateral during 2025.

Centre-right Regione Lombardia has remained largely silent on the municipal programme, a reflection of the ongoing friction between Palazzo Marino and Via Sassetti over who controls data governance for infrastructure projects that cross city and regional boundaries. That political gap has left the Comune to pursue its remediation work without the regional IT resources that would, on paper, make the job faster.

What Comes Next

The Comune's current contract runs through December 2026, with a review scheduled for October that will determine whether the programme gets permanent staffing or reverts to a project-by-project model. For businesses and institutions dealing with permit applications or archive requests, the most practical advice from the Direzione Sistemi Informativi is to include both the internal file reference number and the full cadastral identifier when submitting image-linked documents — a dual-key approach that the system now uses to catch duplicates before they propagate.

The Brera audit is expected to publish its final report in September, and administrators say the methodology developed there may be offered to other Italian civic collections through a framework agreement with the Ministero della Cultura. If Barcelona is currently the European benchmark, Milan's institutions are assembling the architecture to challenge it — though the February 2026 Olympics deadline means the margin for delays is essentially gone.