How San Francisco's City Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What It's Costing Taxpayers

San Francisco's Department of Technology has been quietly working since early 2026 to address a problem that accumulated over roughly a decade: thousands of duplicate image files spread across the city's public-facing digital infrastructure, including SF.gov, the city's 311 portal, and the Planning Department's online project database. The redundancy isn't trivial. Internal audits conducted under the city's Digital Services unit found that some image assets had been uploaded as many as a dozen times across different departmental subdomains, consuming server storage and slowing page-load times that the city pays cloud vendors to host.

The issue matters now because San Francisco is in the middle of the most aggressive push to digitize public services in its recent history. Mayor Daniel Lurie's administration has made streamlined city services a centerpiece of its first year, and the SF.gov modernization effort — inherited from former Mayor London Breed's tenure and the work begun under the Digital Services team — depends on a content infrastructure that is clean enough to support faster deployment of new features. Duplicate images are a symptom of the deeper problem: departments operated for years as digital silos, each uploading their own versions of the same official seals, neighborhood maps, and staff headshots with no shared asset library to check against.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem trace back to at least 2017, when the city began migrating individual department sites onto a unified Drupal-based platform managed through the Department of Technology's Civic Bridge partnerships. That migration was never fully completed. As of 2024, more than 50 city department subsites still operated with varying degrees of independence, each with their own content editors uploading files directly. The San Francisco Human Services Agency, the Recreation and Parks Department — which manages more than 220 parks across the city — and the Municipal Transportation Agency all maintained separate editorial pipelines that fed into nominally shared infrastructure without automated deduplication tools in place.

The problem compounded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when departments rushed to publish guidance pages, testing-site maps, and vaccine distribution graphics, often repurposing and re-uploading existing images rather than linking to centrally stored assets. By the time the Department of Technology conducted a baseline content audit in late 2023, the SF.gov content management system contained an estimated 40,000 image files, with analysts flagging a significant share as near-identical or exact duplicates. That audit, referenced in a Department of Technology budget presentation to the Board of Supervisors in January 2024, identified digital asset management as a priority remediation area for fiscal year 2025-26.

The Cleanup and What Comes Next

The city contracted with a digital services vendor through a competitive bid process finalized in October 2024 to deploy a media asset management layer integrated with the existing Drupal platform. The contract, awarded under the city's standard professional services procurement rules and routed through the Office of Contract Administration on Golden Gate Avenue, is structured to address image deduplication as part of a broader content governance overhaul. City technology staff have been running the deduplication scripts in phases, department by department, rather than attempting a single system-wide purge that could break image references embedded in thousands of existing pages.

For residents, the practical effect should show up in page-load speeds on mobile devices — a persistent complaint filed through the city's 311 app, particularly among users accessing permit-status pages through the Planning Department portal or bus-arrival data through the MTA's real-time feed. Faster-loading pages also have accessibility implications: San Francisco's digital equity commitments, formalized under the city's Digital Equity Strategic Plan adopted in 2021, require that public services remain usable on lower-bandwidth connections common in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and Visitacion Valley.

The Department of Technology has not publicly committed to a completion date for the full deduplication effort, but the current fiscal year budget — covering July 2026 through June 2027 — includes continued funding for the digital asset management project. Residents who encounter broken images or slow-loading city pages can file reports directly through SF.gov's feedback form or call 311, which logs the complaints and routes them to the relevant department's web team. Departments with the largest image libraries, including Recreation and Parks and the Planning Department at 1650 Mission Street, are expected to complete their individual cleanups by the end of the calendar year.