Milan Leads European Push to Purge Duplicate Images From Public Archives — but Rivals Are Closing Fast

Milan's civic image libraries contain tens of thousands of duplicate photographs — the same shot of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II catalogued under four different metadata tags, the same aerial of Porta Nuova filed twice by two separate municipal departments. The city's digital archivists quietly acknowledged the problem in early 2026, and a remediation programme is now underway. With Milan-Cortina 2026 opening in February, the window to fix it is tight.

The issue matters because duplicates are not merely a storage irritant. They distort search results in public-facing databases, inflate licensing costs for media outlets and design studios, and — in a city whose fashion and design economy is built on visual precision — send a poor signal to the global creative industry that treats Milan as a reference point. The Comune di Milano's digital-services directorate has been running an audit of its image repository since January, cross-referencing entries in the city's open-data portal against holdings at the Archivio Fotografico Civico on Via Moscova.

What Milan Is Actually Doing

The centrepiece of the local effort is a deduplication protocol developed jointly by the Politecnico di Milano's Department of Design and a private contractor. The protocol uses perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a compact fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical files even when resolutions or file names differ. By March 2026, the Politecnico team had processed roughly 340,000 images across the civic archive, identifying a reported duplication rate of around 18 percent, according to a presentation circulated at the February Milan Digital Innovation Forum held at BASE Milano in the Tortona district.

The Brera Art Academy's photographic conservation unit has separately been tackling duplicates in its own digitised holdings — a collection that runs to more than 80,000 scanned prints dating back to the 1880s. The academy began integrating its records with the national ICCD (Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione) database in late 2025, a move designed to stop the same heritage image being entered independently by regional archives in Lombardy, Piedmont and Veneto.

Milan's approach contrasts with that of Amsterdam, where the Rijksmuseum completed a full deduplication of its 900,000-image online collection in 2023 using open-source tooling built on the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) standard. The Dutch model has since been adopted by institutions in Paris and Lisbon. Milan's civic archive has not yet committed to IIIF compatibility, a gap that archivists at the Politecnico have flagged as a medium-term risk.

How Other Global Cities Compare

London's Metropolitan Archives finished a three-year deduplication project in 2024, reducing its digitised municipal photograph collection by approximately 22 percent in file count while cutting cloud-storage costs. New York City's Municipal Archives, which holds more than 2 million photographs, began a comparable exercise in 2025 under a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services; that project is expected to run through late 2027.

What distinguishes Milan from those larger civic archives is the commercial pressure from the fashion and design sector. Studios in the Tortona and 5Vie design districts routinely licence historical images of Milanese streets and interiors for editorial and branding use. Duplicate entries with conflicting rights metadata have created licensing disputes — a problem that London and New York, whose archives serve more purely historical functions, have less urgency to resolve. The Comune's digital office has not published a formal cost estimate for the disputes, but industry practitioners in the Zona Tortona area describe the problem as routine and expensive.

The Olympics deadline is focusing minds. The Milan-Cortina 2026 organising committee is drawing on civic image assets for its own communications archive, and clean metadata will matter when broadcasters and sponsors begin clearing rights in the autumn. The Politecnico team expects to deliver a final deduplication report to the Comune di Milano by September 2026. Whether the civic archive then adopts international interoperability standards — or remains a well-cleaned but isolated repository — will define whether Milan's lead over European rivals proves durable or merely temporary.