How San Francisco's City Websites Became a Warehouse of Duplicate and Broken Images — and What's Being Done About It

San Francisco's municipal websites are carrying thousands of duplicate images — the same photographs, graphics, and agency logos stored multiple times across dozens of separate servers — a problem that accumulated over more than a decade of fragmented digital governance and that city technology staff are now actively working to untangle.

The issue landed squarely on the agenda of the Department of Technology's Digital Services division after an internal audit conducted in early 2026 catalogued redundant assets across the city's network of roughly 50 public-facing web properties, which range from the Office of Economic and Workforce Development's small-business portal to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's trip-planning pages. Redundant image files don't just consume server storage — they inflate page-load times, create accessibility problems when alt-text is inconsistently applied, and complicate the work of staff trying to update official communications quickly.

How the Mess Was Made

The roots of the problem run back to the early 2010s, when individual city departments were given wide latitude to stand up their own web presences with limited central coordination. The San Francisco Planning Department, the Public Utilities Commission, and the Department of Public Health each built or contracted separate content management systems. When the city standardized on Drupal-based platforms around 2015 through a migration effort coordinated out of City Hall's Civic Bridge initiative, many departments simply uploaded their existing image libraries wholesale rather than deduplicating them first.

The COVID-19 pandemic made things measurably worse. Between March 2020 and December 2021, departments rushed to post public-health guidance, vaccination-site maps, and emergency-resource graphics at a pace that bypassed the city's normal digital publishing review process. Staff working remotely, often without access to shared asset management tools, uploaded variants of the same infographics repeatedly. The SF.gov redesign project, launched under Mayor London Breed's administration as a flagship government-modernization effort, absorbed many of those legacy assets when it consolidated department subpages — and inherited the redundancies along with them.

A separate complicating factor was the city's reliance on third-party contractors to manage photography for public campaigns. Stock images licensed for one department's use were re-uploaded independently by other departments, sometimes in multiple resolutions, without any centralized licensing registry to flag the duplication. The Department of Technology estimated in a presentation to the city's Committee on Information Technology — a body that oversees municipal IT policy — that redundant and orphaned image files account for a meaningful portion of avoidable cloud-storage costs across city systems, though the department has not yet published a final dollar figure for fiscal year 2025-26.

The Cleanup Effort and What Comes Next

The Digital Services team based at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place began a structured duplicate-image-replacement program in the first quarter of 2026, using automated scanning tools to identify files with matching checksums across the city's content repositories. The program prioritizes the highest-traffic pages first — the SFMTA homepage, the San Francisco Department of Public Health's resource hub on Otis Street, and the city's 311 service portal — before working down to lower-visibility departmental sites.

The practical work involves more than deleting redundant files. Editors must verify that replacement canonical images carry correct alt-text for screen-reader accessibility, meet the city's updated image-compression standards to keep pages loading in under three seconds on mobile connections, and are properly licensed for continued public use. Where stock images were uploaded without adequate licensing documentation, the city is replacing them with photographs from its own growing library of Creative Commons-licensed assets shot by city staff photographers.

Residents and small-business owners who use city digital services — particularly those accessing permit applications through the SF.gov portal or checking real-time transit data through SFMTA's web tools — may notice periodic page updates and visual refreshes over the coming months as the cleanup proceeds. The Department of Technology has indicated the first phase of the replacement program is targeted for completion before the end of calendar year 2026, with a secondary audit planned for early 2027 to assess whether new content governance policies are preventing the problem from re-emerging.