How San Francisco's City Hall Spent Years Posting the Same Photos Over and Over — and What Finally Changed

San Francisco's municipal agencies collectively maintain dozens of public-facing websites, permit portals, and digital archives — and for years, many of those platforms were quietly accumulating the same photographs, graphics, and document scans, sometimes dozens of copies of a single image, scattered across servers with no coordinated replacement protocol. The Department of Technology's 2025 internal audit of citywide digital asset management, released in January of this year, identified the problem as systemic rather than isolated.

The timing matters. The city is deep into a multi-year push to modernize its digital infrastructure under the San Francisco Digital Services initiative, a program that traces its formal roots to a 2019 Board of Supervisors resolution directing departments to standardize their online presence. That initiative stalled during the pandemic, then restarted unevenly as agencies began migrating legacy content to the new SF.gov platform. What nobody had fully accounted for was what happened to all the old files.

Layers of Bureaucracy, Layers of Files

The duplication problem developed incrementally. When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Department of Public Health, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development each began migrating content to newer content management systems between 2021 and 2023, staff typically uploaded fresh copies of images rather than linking to existing assets. A photograph of the Civic Center plaza, for instance, might exist in separate folders maintained by the Mayor's Office of Communications, the Recreation and Park Department, and the Planning Department — each unaware the others held the same file. Storage costs are not the primary concern on their own, but duplicates create real downstream problems: broken attributions, inconsistent alt-text for accessibility compliance, and confusion over which version of an image is the approved, current one.

The SF.gov migration, managed by the city's Digital Services team based at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, has involved more than 40 city departments since a phased rollout began in earnest in late 2022. According to the Department of Technology's January audit — the document does not name individual staff, but attributes findings to the Digital Services directorate — the city's shared content repositories contained an estimated 34 percent redundancy rate in image assets across departments that had already completed migration. Departments still in transition showed rates above 50 percent in some cases.

The problem is rooted partly in procurement cycles. Each department historically purchased or renewed its own web hosting and content management contracts, meaning a Communications staffer at the SFMTA had no technical incentive or practical mechanism to check whether the same stock photo already lived on a Planning Department server on Van Ness Avenue. When the city consolidated under Salesforce-based infrastructure and later moved components to cloud environments managed through state Master Service Agreements, those siloed libraries came with the departments.

The Replacement Protocol Takes Shape

The city's response, outlined in a Digital Services working document circulated to department heads in March 2026, calls for a centralized Digital Asset Management system — a single library where images are tagged, versioned, and shared across agencies. The target date for a pilot covering five departments, including the Office of Transgender Initiatives and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, is October 2026. Full citywide rollout is projected for mid-2027, contingent on budget approval in the current fiscal year cycle that began July 1.

For San Francisco residents, the practical effect will be subtle but real. Accessibility advocates have long complained that duplicate images often carry inconsistent or missing alt-text, making the city's websites less usable for people relying on screen readers. The Castro and Mission districts both have active neighborhood groups that regularly pull city permit and planning documents, and their members have flagged outdated renderings and mismatched photos in public notices as a persistent source of confusion during community review processes.

Departments currently managing their own image libraries should expect guidance from the Department of Technology before September, according to the March working document. Staff responsible for uploading content to SF.gov are being directed in the interim to use the existing shared media folder structure and to flag suspected duplicates through the digital services helpdesk rather than simply uploading again. It is a low-tech stopgap, but it is the first formal policy the city has had on the subject.