Milan's Cultural Institutions Are Reckoning With Duplicate Images in Their Digital Archives — and Officials Want Action

A quiet crisis has been building inside Milan's most prized digital collections. Duplicate images — identical or near-identical photographs and scans catalogued under different reference numbers — have cluttered the city's public and private cultural archives for years, wasting storage, distorting search results and, in some cases, skewing the metadata records that underpin international loans and licensing agreements. Now administrators and heritage specialists are publicly demanding a structured response.

The urgency is sharpened by the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, which opens this coming February and is expected to draw sustained global attention to Lombardy's cultural identity alongside its sporting infrastructure. City Hall has been pushing cultural bodies to accelerate the digitisation and cleaning of their public-facing catalogues before that window arrives. A technical round-table convened at the Palazzo Marino last month brought together representatives from the Comune di Milano's cultural directorate, staff from the Pinacoteca di Brera and archivists from the Museo del Novecento — all of them wrestling with the same underlying problem.

What the Experts Are Saying

Specialists in digital heritage management have been blunt about the scale of the issue. Industry estimates widely cited in the archival sector suggest that large institutional image databases can carry duplicate rates of between eight and fifteen percent when collections have been digitised in multiple phases over a decade or more — a pattern that mirrors precisely how both the Brera and the Novecento built their online catalogues through a series of separate grant-funded projects between roughly 2010 and 2023. No official figure for Milan's specific duplicate count has been released publicly.

The technical fix itself is well understood: perceptual hashing algorithms can flag visually identical or near-identical files automatically, after which human curators validate the matches and merge or retire redundant records. The debate in Milan, according to participants in the Palazzo Marino round-table, is not about the technology but about governance. Who owns the deduplication process? Who funds it? And which metadata standard — the Dublin Core framework used by national institutions or the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model preferred by larger European museums — should govern the merged records going forward?

The Lombardy regional government, whose offices sit in the Palazzo Lombardia tower on Piazza Città di Lombardia, has a financial stake in the outcome. Regional cultural funding flows partly through the Direzione Generale Autonomia e Cultura, and tensions between the centre-right regional administration and the centre-left Comune di Milano have occasionally complicated joint projects. In this case, however, there is reported agreement in principle that duplication imposes real costs — both in cloud storage expenditure and in the reputational risk of presenting muddled catalogues to international partners during a high-profile Olympic year.

Fashion and Design Archives Face the Same Problem

The issue is not confined to fine art institutions. Milan's fashion economy — which according to Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana data generates tens of billions of euros annually for the wider Lombardy supply chain — relies increasingly on authenticated digital image archives for brand licensing, runway documentation and intellectual property enforcement. Several major houses with showrooms and archival facilities in the Porta Nuova district and along Via della Spiga have been quietly engaging specialist firms to audit their internal image libraries.

The Fondazione Prada, headquartered in the redeveloped distillery complex on Largo Isarco in the Ortomercato area, has been among the more visible institutions openly discussing the need for cleaner digital infrastructure as part of its broader commitment to long-term preservation standards. No specific programme or budget figure has been made public by the foundation.

For institutions moving forward, archival specialists advise a three-stage approach: an automated initial sweep using hashing tools, a curatorial review phase in which provenance metadata is used to determine which version of a duplicate holds the authoritative record, and finally a governance document that locks in responsibility for ongoing maintenance. The Comune di Milano's cultural directorate is expected to circulate a formal recommendation on standards to city-funded institutions before the end of September 2026 — leaving a narrow but workable runway before the Olympic spotlight arrives.