How San Francisco's City Websites Ended Up Buried in Duplicate Images — and Why Fixing It Became a Priority

San Francisco's municipal websites are carrying a weight problem that has nothing to do with traffic. Across the roughly 50 separate departmental sites maintained under the sf.gov umbrella, digital asset managers have identified tens of thousands of duplicate image files — the same photos of City Hall's rotunda, the same headshots of department directors, the same stock renderings of housing blueprints uploaded again and again by staffers who had no shared library to draw from. The problem, long acknowledged inside the Department of Technology's Digital Services division, has finally moved to the top of the remediation list as the city prepares a broad content management overhaul scheduled to roll out in phases beginning in early 2027.

The timing matters. San Francisco spent much of the past three years in a housing and homelessness content sprint — pushing updates to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing site, refreshing the Planning Department's pages on Market Octavia and Eastern Neighborhoods plans, and expanding the SF.gov portal after the pandemic exposed how poorly designed the city's digital infrastructure actually was. Every new push added files. Nobody built a centralised dam.

How the Pile-Up Happened

Blame a combination of factors that will sound familiar to anyone who has followed San Francisco government closely. The city runs on a patchwork of content management systems — some departments stayed on legacy Drupal builds while others migrated to the newer sf.gov Gatsby-based architecture managed out of the Digital Services office at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place. When staffers in, say, the Recreation and Parks Department needed an image of Dolores Park for an event announcement, they uploaded their own copy rather than searching a shared repository that, for most of the past decade, did not functionally exist.

The pandemic made everything worse. Between March 2020 and December 2021, city departments pushed an unprecedented volume of emergency updates — vaccine site maps, shelter availability charts, Small Business Recovery Act explainers for merchants on Clement Street and the Tenderloin's Larkin corridor. Speed was the mandate. Housekeeping was not. Photographers from the SF Office of Communications shot the same ribbon-cuttings at the same Bayview community sites and uploaded fresh copies each time without cross-referencing existing archives.

Tech sector layoffs that hit parts of the city's contractor workforce in 2023 and 2024 compounded the problem. Several digital agencies that held city contracts for web maintenance reduced their San Francisco headcount, leaving departments to manage content with less outside support. Internal IT staffing at some agencies dropped by as much as a fifth during the same period, according to workforce data the Department of Human Resources publishes annually. Duplicate images were nobody's emergency.

The Cost of Neglect

Storage costs for government cloud infrastructure are not trivial. San Francisco's city government moved significant portions of its digital assets to cloud hosting beginning around 2019, and cloud storage bills scale with volume. The Digital Services division has not released a specific dollar figure tied exclusively to image redundancy, but technology auditors at comparable city governments — New York City's Office of Technology and Innovation published a 2024 infrastructure report — have found that unmanaged digital asset bloat can account for between 8 and 15 percent of unnecessary cloud expenditure in large municipal environments. Applied against San Francisco's publicly reported IT operating budget, that range is not trivial.

Page load speed is the more immediate public-facing consequence. Sites burdened with redundant, unoptimised image files load more slowly, a problem that matters most to residents using older phones or public Wi-Fi — precisely the populations most dependent on city services at libraries like the Main Branch on Larkin Street or the Mission Branch on 24th Street.

The Digital Services team has begun a deduplication audit using automated asset-scanning tools, with a target of reducing the image library by at least 30 percent before the 2027 platform migration begins. Departments have been asked to designate a digital asset coordinator — a role that at many agencies will fall to existing staff rather than new hires. Residents and advocacy groups who interact with city digital services can flag broken or redundant content through the sf.gov feedback tool, a small lever that has, according to the department's own public documentation, driven meaningful corrections in past update cycles. The work is unglamorous. It is also overdue.