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

San Francisco's Department of Technology has been quietly grappling with a problem that sounds mundane but carries a real price tag: thousands of duplicate images spread across the city's constellation of municipal websites, from the Department of Public Health's online portal to the SF Planning Department's project database on South Van Ness Avenue. The redundancy, built up over more than a decade of piecemeal content management, has driven up cloud storage expenditures and degraded page-load times on platforms that residents depend on for permit applications, health appointments, and transit information.

The issue matters right now because the city is in the middle of a broader digital modernization push, driven partly by budget pressure from the ongoing homelessness and fentanyl crisis response, which has forced every department to justify its operational spending. Mayor Daniel Lurie's administration inherited a technology infrastructure last reorganized in earnest under former Mayor London Breed's 2021 digital equity initiative, and the current fiscal year — running through June 30, 2027 — has put IT line items under a sharper lens than usual.

How Decades of Patchwork Uploading Created the Problem

The root cause is straightforward: San Francisco operates well over 50 distinct web properties, managed by separate departments with separate content teams and, historically, no unified digital asset management system. When a communications staffer at, say, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency on South Van Ness needed a photograph of a Muni Metro train, they uploaded their own copy. So did the team at SF Environment on Turk Street. So did the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. No one was talking to anyone else.

The city's content management landscape fragmented further after 2016, when several departments migrated to Drupal-based platforms on different timelines. Each migration carried old image libraries forward — sometimes multiple times, as servers were consolidated — without deduplication. A single photograph of the Bay Bridge taken for a 2014 tourism campaign, for instance, could reasonably exist in a dozen separate upload folders across the city's infrastructure today, each copy occupying its own storage allocation and each potentially indexed separately by search engines, creating SEO conflicts that bury useful city information behind outdated pages.

Cloud storage is not free. San Francisco's Department of Technology reported in its Fiscal Year 2024-25 budget documentation that citywide cloud services represent one of the fastest-growing line items in the city's technology budget, with costs scaling alongside data volume. Duplicate image files, while individually small, aggregate into gigabytes across a portfolio this large. Industry estimates for municipal governments of San Francisco's scale — around 870,000 residents served — typically put redundant asset storage waste in the range of 15 to 30 percent of total media storage costs, though the city has not published a specific figure for its own duplication rate.

What a Fix Actually Looks Like — and Who Pays for It

The Department of Technology has been piloting a centralized Digital Asset Management platform, tested first with the Office of Civic Innovation and the SF Digital Services team based at City Hall. The goal is a single repository where departments upload once and share, rather than maintaining siloed libraries. Rollout to major departments — including SF Public Works and the Department of Building Inspection on Duboce Avenue — is expected in phases through the end of calendar year 2026.

The practical cleanup, though, is largely manual. Content teams must audit existing libraries, flag duplicates, and either delete redundant files or redirect links — a process that can break older web pages if not handled carefully. The SF Digital Services team has published internal guidance on image replacement workflows, but adoption across departments with stretched staffing has been uneven.

For residents, the near-term consequence is occasional broken image links on older city web pages, particularly in the SF Planning Department's archive of environmental review documents and on legacy pages of the SF Recreation and Parks Department site. The city has asked department webmasters to prioritize fixing any broken assets on pages related to active permit applications and health services first. The broader library cleanup, by most internal timelines, will stretch well into 2027 — a quiet infrastructure project that rarely makes headlines but shapes whether city government actually works online.