How Milan's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of the Same Image Twice: The Story Behind the Duplicate Problem

Milan's public-facing digital infrastructure has a clutter problem. Across municipal websites, Olympic promotional platforms, and the design-sector portals that represent the city internationally, duplicate images — the same photograph or graphic asset stored and published multiple times under different file names — have quietly accumulated into a structural headache that archivists, web managers, and communications officers are now being asked to untangle.

The issue matters most right now because the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, opening in February, has forced a long-overdue audit of every official digital channel associated with the Games. Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026, the organising body headquartered on Via Turati, has been working since early 2025 to consolidate its media library ahead of the global broadcast window. What that process exposed was not unique to the Olympics operation: it reflected a problem baked into years of decentralised, deadline-driven publishing across the city.

A Decade of Growth, a Decade of Digital Sprawl

The roots go back to roughly 2014 and 2015, when the Expo 2015 preparations triggered an explosion in commissioned photography, architectural renders, and promotional video stills. Porta Nuova — the mixed-use district anchored by the Bosco Verticale towers on Via Garibaldi — generated tens of thousands of image assets alone, distributed to journalists, real estate portals, and tourism boards simultaneously. There was no unified digital asset management system. Files were emailed, uploaded, re-uploaded, and renamed by different departments working in parallel. By the time Expo opened in May 2015 on the Rho Fiera site, the duplication was already embedded.

The pattern repeated during every subsequent major initiative. The launch of the Biblioteca degli Alberi park in Porta Nuova in 2018 produced another wave of photography distributed across Comune di Milano channels, private developer platforms run by Coima, and national press offices — often with no shared metadata standard. Fashion Week, held twice a year in venues stretching from the Quadrilatero della Moda around Via Montenapoleone to temporary installations in the Tortona district, generates roughly 30,000 to 50,000 press images per edition according to general industry estimates, each season building on an uncleared archive from the last.

The Comune di Milano's own digital communications office, based in Palazzo Marino on Piazza della Scala, began formalising a duplicate-detection protocol only in 2023, when a routine accessibility audit under European Union Web Accessibility Directive compliance rules surfaced the scale of the redundancy. Files were not merely duplicated aesthetically — they were consuming server budget, slowing load times on high-traffic civic portals, and in several cases serving outdated images of demolished or significantly altered structures as if current.

Why Fixing It Is Harder Than It Sounds

The technical fix — deploying perceptual hashing algorithms to flag near-identical images, then running human review queues — is well understood. The governance question is harder. Milan's digital publishing ecosystem involves at least three distinct layers: municipal government channels, semi-autonomous bodies like MM SpA which manages infrastructure projects, and private-sector partners whose image rights may restrict deletion or consolidation. A photograph of a Porta Nuova atrium taken in 2016 might be licensed to the Comune for web use but owned by an architectural photography studio in Brera — deleting the duplicate requires sign-off the city does not always have the staff to chase.

The Olympic deadline has given the process urgency it previously lacked. Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026's media team set an internal target of completing its consolidated asset library by September 2026 — before the main accreditation window for international broadcasters opens. Whether the broader municipal audit keeps pace with that schedule is less certain. The Comune di Milano's digital team has not announced a firm completion date for its own deduplication work.

For organisations watching from outside city hall — agencies in the Tortona design cluster, fashion houses maintaining their own brand archives, cultural institutions on Corso Magenta — the practical advice from digital archivists is consistent: do not wait for a top-down solution. Adopt a single naming convention now, run a perceptual hash check on existing libraries before the next major campaign, and register rights metadata at the point of file creation rather than retrospectively. Milan's next big image moment is only months away.