Milan Tackles Duplicate Image Replacement Faster Than Paris or London — But Still Trails Amsterdam

Milan's major public institutions and creative agencies have accelerated programmes to systematically replace duplicate digital images in their archives, a housekeeping task that sounds mundane until you consider the scale: the city's design and fashion economy generates an estimated tens of millions of asset files annually, concentrated between the Porta Nuova district and the Brera Design District, two of the densest clusters of creative output in Europe. The push is being driven, in part, by the looming pressure of Milan-Cortina 2026, which is expected to dump an enormous volume of photographic content into municipal and commercial systems before the Winter Games open in February.

The timing matters. With Ayatollah Khamenei's funeral drawing global media attention this week and Ukrainian strikes on Russian infrastructure keeping news agencies on high output, digital asset management teams across European capitals are stress-testing their pipelines. Duplicate imagery — the same photograph stored multiple times under different filenames or in different resolutions — clogs storage, distorts search results, and in the case of news and public-record archives, creates compliance headaches under European data regulations. Milan's cultural institutions have decided they can no longer treat the problem as background noise.

What Milan Is Actually Doing

The Comune di Milano's digital infrastructure office, based on Via Larga, has been running a deduplication initiative under its broader Smart City programme since January 2026. The effort targets the city's publicly accessible image repositories, including promotional assets for events at Palazzo Marino and the archive material connected to the Triennale di Milano on Viale Alemagna. The Triennale alone holds decades of design exhibition photography, much of it scanned from analogue originals, where duplication rates on digitisation runs can reach 30 percent or higher before any cleaning pass is applied.

Separately, the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, which coordinates the fashion weeks that fill the Fiera Milano complex in Rho every season, began requiring member houses to submit deduplicated image packages as a condition of accreditation for the September 2025 fashion week cycle. That requirement is now standard. The organisation did not publicly break out compliance rates, but industry observers noted the policy change marked a significant shift from previous seasons when brands submitted redundant galleries with no penalty.

How Milan Compares

Paris and London are the obvious benchmarks. The Bibliothèque nationale de France launched its own large-scale deduplication effort across the Gallica digital library in 2023, processing millions of scanned pages and images. Progress has been well documented in their annual digital reports, but the BnF's challenge is archival in nature — historical photographs rather than live commercial feeds. London's Victoria and Albert Museum began a similar programme in 2024, targeting its 1.2 million digitised objects on the Collections Online portal. Both institutions are operating on longer timescales than Milan's commercially driven push, which has a hard deadline in the form of the Olympics.

Amsterdam is ahead. The Rijksmuseum's Rijksstudio platform, which allows the public to download and remix high-resolution images from the collection, implemented perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually similar images regardless of filename or format — as far back as 2021. By the museum's own published figures, the process reduced redundant files in the active serving layer by roughly 40 percent within eighteen months. Milan's institutions are now studying that model closely.

New York and Tokyo present different cases. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York dealt with the problem at scale through its 2017 open-access release, when a forced audit before publication surfaced significant duplication. Tokyo's approach has been more fragmented, spread across prefecture-level cultural agencies without a unified standard.

For Milan, the practical next step is extending the deduplication standard beyond public institutions into the private sector, particularly the dozens of photography agencies and post-production houses clustered around the Tortona district. The Comune's Smart City office is expected to publish technical guidelines for private operators before the end of the third quarter of 2026. Whether those guidelines carry any binding force, or remain advisory, will determine how thoroughly Milan closes the gap with Amsterdam before the Olympic torch — and the camera crews — arrive.