SF City Departments Push to Replace Duplicate and Outdated Images Across Public-Facing Digital Systems This Week

San Francisco's Department of Technology has been working through a backlog of duplicate and low-resolution images embedded across dozens of city-run digital platforms, with staff flagging the cleanup effort as a priority before the next round of SFMTA and BART wayfinding app updates rolls out later this summer. The work, which picked up pace this week ahead of the July 4 holiday, touches everything from the Planning Department's online permit portal on Seventh Street to the public-facing dashboards maintained by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

The timing matters because San Francisco is mid-cycle on several major digital infrastructure overhauls. SFMTA is scheduled to push an updated version of its real-time Muni arrival app in August, and the city's broader Digital Services modernization program — housed inside the Department of Technology at 1 South Van Ness Avenue — has set a Q3 2026 deadline for retiring legacy content management systems that have been running since at least 2019. Duplicate images bloat page-load times, create accessibility problems for screen-reader users, and complicate the metadata tagging required under California's AB 434 web accessibility mandate.

What the Audit Found

The image audit, conducted across roughly 40 city-run web domains, turned up several categories of problems. Stock photographs were appearing in multiple departments with different captions — the same aerial shot of the Bay Bridge waterfront, for instance, labeled variously as a header for the Port of San Francisco's homepage and as a background image on the Office of Economic and Workforce Development site in the Tenderloin. Headshot photographs of former staff members, including some who left city employment years ago, were still appearing on departmental contact pages. And event photography from pre-pandemic programming at venues like the Civic Center Plaza and the Moscone Center had been re-uploaded repeatedly without the older versions being retired, creating redundant file clusters in the city's shared content library.

California's Government Code Section 7405 requires state and local agencies to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and duplicate or mislabeled images directly affect how those guidelines score a site. The city's last published accessibility audit, covering the fiscal year ending June 2025, found that image-related errors accounted for a meaningful share of flagged issues across municipal platforms, though the Department of Technology has not yet released the full breakdown for fiscal year 2026.

Practical Steps Being Taken Now

The SF Digital Services team has been running deduplication scripts against the city's shared asset library since late June, cross-referencing file hashes to identify exact duplicates before flagging near-duplicates for manual review. The Neighborhood Services division at the Department of Public Works, which manages photography for its street-condition reporting tool SeeClickFix SF, completed its own image cleanup in the week ending July 2, removing more than 300 redundant before-and-after pothole photographs that had been uploaded by field crews in duplicate.

For residents and small business owners who interact with city digital tools — submitting permit applications through the SF Planning portal, checking shelter bed availability through the navigation center locator, or tracking Muni lines through the MuniMobile app — the practical effect of the cleanup should be faster load times and fewer broken image icons on mobile connections. The Planning Department's permit portal, which handles roughly 1,500 submissions per week according to figures the department published in its fiscal year 2025 annual report, has historically drawn complaints about slow performance on the Castro and Mission District neighborhood-specific planning pages.

The Department of Technology has indicated the first phase of the deduplication effort should wrap by July 18, ahead of a presentation to the city's Committee on Information Technology. A second phase, covering photography held in the legacy Drupal instances still running under the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development, is expected to begin in August. Anyone managing imagery for a city-funded nonprofit or community benefits program who uploads content to a city-hosted portal is being asked to review the updated file-naming conventions posted on the SF Digital Services documentation hub at digitalservices.sfgov.org before the end of the month.