How Milan's Digital Archives Got Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Why It Took Years to Reach a Crisis Point

Milan's public digital archives are carrying tens of thousands of duplicate image files across at least four major institutional databases, a situation that has quietly accumulated since the city's first aggressive digitisation push in the early 2010s and is now demanding urgent resolution ahead of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics in February. The duplication problem affects everything from historical photographs held by the Archivio Civico in Via Moneta to the promotional image libraries managed by the Comune di Milano's communications directorate on Via Larga.

The timing matters. With international media attention beginning to sharpen on Milan as a host city, the sprawl of inconsistent, duplicated visual assets is creating practical headaches for press offices, event coordinators, and the institutions partnering with the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation. A single photograph of the Porta Nuova skyline, for instance, can exist in multiple versions across separate servers — differently cropped, differently colour-corrected, with conflicting metadata and rights information attached to each. That is not merely inefficient. In a city whose brand is built on precision and design authority, it is a reputational liability.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots go back to 2011 and 2012, when the Comune di Milano and institutions including the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana in Viale Fulvio Testi began digitising physical collections at scale. Each body operated its own content management system with its own naming conventions. There was no shared metadata standard, no centralised repository, and no deduplication protocol. Files migrated between systems during platform upgrades — particularly after a broader IT infrastructure refresh the city undertook between 2018 and 2020 — and copies multiplied with each migration.

The fashion and design sector added its own layer of complexity. During Milan Design Week, which draws around 300,000 visitors annually to the Fuorisalone events spread across districts like Brera and Tortona, the city's communications teams routinely pulled images from multiple sources simultaneously to feed social media, press packs, and partner organisations. A photograph originating from a single accredited agency could end up filed under different identifiers in the Comune's press archive, the Fondazione Fiera Milano asset library at Rho, and a shared drive used by the tourism body Visit Milan. No one was copying improperly. The system simply lacked any mechanism to detect it was happening.

What Pressure Finally Forced the Issue

The Olympics preparation changed the calculus. From late 2024, the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation began auditing the visual asset pipelines of all partner institutions to build a unified media centre capable of serving international broadcasters and press agencies under a single accreditation system. Internal audits, the results of which have been discussed in planning meetings but not published in full, reportedly surfaced duplication rates in some institutional collections running well above 30 percent of total stored image files.

That figure, if confirmed publicly, would be consistent with what digital archivists and library science researchers have documented in comparable large-scale municipal digitisation projects across European cities. Duplication rates between 25 and 40 percent are considered typical in archives that underwent rapid digitisation without parallel investment in metadata governance — a problem documented by the European Commission's Europeana network, which has been working since 2015 to harmonise cultural heritage data across member state institutions.

For Milan, the practical resolution path now involves adopting a perceptual hashing protocol — a technical method that compares image content rather than file names — combined with a unified rights management layer across participating institutions. The Comune's digital services unit and the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation are understood to be working toward a consolidated platform ahead of the Games' opening in February 2026. Institutions from the Pinacoteca di Brera on Via Brera to the Museo del Novecento overlooking Piazza del Duomo are expected to feed into the system once baseline deduplication is complete. The window to finish that work, given broadcast media preparation timelines, is effectively the autumn of this year.