How San Francisco's City Websites Became Buried in Duplicate Images — and What's Finally Being Done About It

San Francisco's sprawling network of municipal websites contains hundreds of thousands of duplicate image files — the same photos uploaded dozens of times across different department portals, costing the city in storage fees, slowing page load times, and making accessibility compliance nearly impossible to audit. The Department of Technology confirmed in its fiscal year 2025–2026 budget review that digital asset management reform was listed as a priority remediation item, a signal that the problem had grown too large to ignore.

The issue didn't arrive overnight. It accumulated across roughly two decades of fragmented digital governance, during which individual city departments — from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency on South Van Ness Avenue to the Department of Public Health's Civic Center offices — maintained their own content management systems with little coordination. When departments migrated to newer platforms, legacy image libraries rarely got cleaned up. They got copied over instead.

A City That Built Its Web Presence Department by Department

San Francisco currently operates more than 50 distinct public-facing websites, according to the Department of Technology's digital services inventory published in 2024. Each site evolved independently. The Recreation and Parks Department, headquartered near McLaren Lodge in Golden Gate Park, built its own image repositories for park photography. The Planning Department at 49 South Van Ness developed separate asset folders for project renderings and neighborhood maps. The Controller's Office, the Public Utilities Commission, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development — all maintained parallel systems.

When Mayor London Breed launched the sf.gov consolidation initiative in 2019, the goal was to funnel residents toward a single, unified portal. Progress was real but incomplete. Core transactional services moved to the centralized platform, but departmental subsites remained, each carrying years of image backups. Duplicate replacement — the process of identifying, consolidating, and retiring redundant files — was deprioritized whenever budget cycles tightened. Between 2020 and 2023, city technology budgets absorbed repeated cuts as COVID-19 recovery spending dominated the General Fund.

The practical consequences are measurable. A 2023 audit by the City Services Auditor found that city websites averaged page load times well above the federal Web Content Accessibility Guidelines benchmark, with image-heavy pages among the slowest performers. Slow load times disproportionately affect residents accessing city services on mobile devices in neighborhoods with weaker connectivity, including parts of the Tenderloin and Bayview-Hunters Point.

The Push for Systematic Cleanup

The current remediation effort centers on a duplicate-detection protocol being piloted through San Francisco Digital Services, the team embedded within the Department of Technology at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place. The program uses hash-matching software to flag identical or near-identical image files across the city's content management systems, then routes confirmed duplicates to department web coordinators for review before deletion.

The work is methodical and unglamorous. Staff must verify that a flagged image isn't the only surviving copy of a legally required public record before removing it — a constraint that slows bulk deletion and requires human sign-off at each step. The city's digital records retention schedule, last updated in 2021, classifies certain photographic records as permanent, complicating automated cleanup.

Storage costs alone justify the effort. Cloud hosting fees for municipal websites run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually citywide, and redundant files contribute directly to that overhead. Trimming image libraries could reduce those costs meaningfully without any impact on public-facing services.

For residents and journalists who rely on city websites to access planning documents, SFMTA route maps, or DPH data, the practical payoff of the cleanup will be faster pages and more reliable search results within city portals. Department web coordinators have been asked to submit their first duplicate-removal reports by the end of the current fiscal year, which closes June 30, 2027. Whether individual agencies treat that deadline as firm will depend largely on how closely the Department of Technology chooses to follow up.