Milan's Archive War: How the City Is Fighting Duplicate Images Across Its Digital Collections — and How It Stacks Up Against Paris, Amsterdam and New York

Milan's civic image problem is measurable and unglamorous. Across the municipality's digital holdings — from the Archivio Fotografico del Comune to the visual databases maintained by institutions along Corso Magenta — duplicate images account for a significant share of catalogued assets, slowing access, inflating storage costs and confusing researchers who cannot tell which version of a photograph is authoritative. The problem has moved from a back-office nuisance to an active policy concern in 2026, as the city accelerates digitisation work tied to the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February.

Why now? The Olympics pressure is real. The Palazzo Marino administration has committed to presenting a coherent visual record of the city — its architecture, its infrastructure upgrades, its cultural programme — to international media and broadcasters arriving for the Games. Duplicate and mislabelled images undermine that effort. Institutions from the Pinacoteca di Brera to the Fondazione Prada's communications archive are being asked to audit their digital holdings and eliminate redundant files before a coordination deadline later this year.

What Other Cities Have Learned

Milan is not starting from scratch, but it is starting late relative to some peers. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum completed a systematic deduplication of its Rijksstudio digital collection — more than 700,000 objects — by 2023, using perceptual hashing tools that compare images at the pixel-pattern level rather than relying on file names or metadata alone. The result was a publicly searchable archive with a dramatically lower rate of redundant entries. Paris's Bibliothèque nationale de France, managing assets through its Gallica platform, adopted a hybrid approach: automated flagging followed by human curatorial review, a process that took three years and required dedicated staffing.

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art made headlines in 2017 when it released 375,000 images under open access licences — but the release itself surfaced the duplicate problem, because years of scanning at different resolutions had produced multiple versions of the same object. The Met spent roughly two subsequent years reconciling those files. Milan's institutions are studying that timeline carefully.

The technical baseline in Milan varies sharply by institution. The Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which holds one of Europe's most significant collections of manuscripts and prints near Piazza Pio XI, has a comparatively mature digital cataloguing system developed through partnerships with academic institutions. Smaller civic photography archives, particularly those covering the postwar Porta Nuova and Isola neighbourhoods, were digitised under multiple separate grant programmes with inconsistent metadata standards — exactly the conditions that produce duplicate proliferation.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage is not cheap, and duplicates are not a minor overhead. Cloud storage pricing for large cultural institutions in the EU has risen over the past two years as demand has outpaced infrastructure. Beyond cost, the practical stakes are searchability and legal clarity: when a photographer's work exists in three different versions across two databases, rights management becomes genuinely complicated, particularly in a city where fashion-house commissioning of archival images — along Via Montenapoleone and across the Quadrilatero della Moda — is a live commercial activity.

The Comune di Milano has been in dialogue with Regione Lombardia over how digitisation projects should be coordinated, though the centre-left city government and the centre-right regional administration have not always moved in lockstep on cultural infrastructure priorities. That tension has practical consequences: funding streams for archive maintenance sit across different budget lines, and institutions sometimes find themselves navigating contradictory compliance requirements.

For organisations looking to get ahead of the problem, the clearest near-term advice from institutions that have already done this work is to treat deduplication as a precondition of any new digitisation, not an afterthought. Ingesting new material into an already cluttered system compounds the problem geometrically. Milan's cultural sector has until the autumn coordination deadline to demonstrate progress. Given what Paris and Amsterdam learned — that this work takes longer and costs more than initial estimates suggest — institutions along the city's cultural corridor from Brera to the Fondazione Feltrinelli at Porta Volta would do well to start the audit now, not after the next grant cycle opens.