How San Francisco's City Websites Became a Graveyard of Broken Images — and What It's Going to Cost to Fix It

San Francisco's public-facing government websites are carrying an estimated tens of thousands of duplicate image files — redundant, misnamed, or outright broken assets that slow page loads, confuse screen readers, and quietly undermine the city's push to modernize how residents access services. The Department of Technology has been quietly cataloguing the scope of the problem since late 2025, according to public budget documents filed with the Controller's Office, and the cleanup effort is now formally part of the city's Digital Equity and Accessibility initiative funded through the fiscal year 2026 budget cycle.

The issue matters right now because San Francisco is in the middle of a broader platform consolidation. The city's Office of Civic Innovation has been migrating dozens of departmental sub-sites onto a unified Salesforce-based portal framework — a project that began in earnest in 2023 and is supposed to reach completion by the end of calendar year 2026. Every migration surfaces the same problem: image libraries that were never organized to begin with, duplicate uploads from multiple staffers working without shared asset protocols, and placeholder graphics that were meant to be temporary but became permanent fixtures for years.

A Legacy of Patchwork Systems

The roots of the mess go back at least a decade. Before the city standardized on its current Drupal-based content management stack — which itself is now being phased out — individual departments ran their own web operations with minimal coordination from the Department of Technology at 1 South Van Ness Avenue. The Department of Public Health, the Planning Department over on Mission Street at Seventh, and the Municipal Transportation Agency each maintained separate image repositories with no shared naming conventions and no automated deduplication checks.

When staffers left — and turnover accelerated sharply during the 2020 to 2022 period — institutional knowledge about which images were live, which were archived, and which were simply forgotten walked out the door with them. The result was file directories bloated with near-identical versions of the same maps, headshots, and infographic panels. Some San Francisco Planning Department subdirectories, flagged in a 2025 internal audit referenced in public budget hearings, contained four or five versions of the same neighborhood zoning map, each uploaded separately by different staff members across different years, with no metadata linking them.

That audit, which the Controller's Office incorporated into its digital infrastructure review submitted in November 2025, found that redundant media assets were contributing to measurable page-weight problems on high-traffic city pages — including the 311 service portal and the sf.gov housing resources hub, two of the most visited government pages in the city. Slow load times disproportionately affect residents accessing government sites on older mobile devices, a concern the city's digital equity team has flagged repeatedly in public meetings held at venues including the Main Library on Larkin Street.

The Path Forward — and the Price Tag

The city allocated funding within the Department of Technology's fiscal year 2026 budget to address the problem through a combination of automated scanning tools and contracted digital asset management work. The figure attached to the image audit and remediation line item, as listed in the approved budget, is $1.4 million — covering software licensing, a short-term contractor team, and staff training for department web coordinators.

The practical approach involves running deduplication algorithms across the unified content repository, flagging assets with identical or near-identical hash values, and then routing flagged files to department liaisons for human review before deletion. That last step is deliberate: automated deletion without human sign-off has burned city IT projects before, most notably during a 2019 records management initiative at the Department of Building Inspection that resulted in the temporary loss of permit documentation.

For San Francisco residents, the visible payoff should be faster-loading pages on sf.gov and fewer instances of the broken image icons that currently litter older departmental pages. For city staff, the consolidation into a single managed asset library means that the next time a department updates a map or a graphic, there will be one authoritative file — not five. The Department of Technology has set an internal target of completing the first full deduplication pass by October 2026, ahead of the broader platform migration deadline.