How San Francisco's City Websites Became a Maze of Repeated, Outdated Images — and Who's Trying to Fix It

San Francisco's Office of Digital Services has spent much of 2026 quietly wrestling with a problem hiding in plain sight: thousands of duplicate images embedded across the city's portfolio of roughly 50 public-facing websites, from the Department of Public Health's sfgov portal to the Municipal Transportation Agency's trip-planning pages. The effort to identify, catalog, and replace that redundant content is part of a broader remediation push that began in earnest after a March 2026 audit flagged the scale of the issue.

The timing matters. San Francisco is in the middle of a push to consolidate digital services under a unified sfgov.org architecture — a project that has been in motion since at least 2021 but accelerated after City Hall committed additional funding in the Fiscal Year 2024–25 budget cycle. Dragging duplicate, mismatched, or rights-unclear images into a consolidated platform doesn't just look sloppy. It creates legal exposure around image licensing, degrades page-load performance on mobile devices, and undermines the accessibility standards the city is required to meet under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates descriptive alt-text for every image used in public digital content.

How the Problem Compounded Over Five Years

The roots run back to the pandemic. Between March 2020 and late 2021, individual city departments uploaded content at a pace and volume no central team could monitor. The Department of Emergency Management alone published hundreds of informational graphics, many recycled from federal templates and stamped with city branding. The Recreation and Parks Department re-uploaded the same Dolores Park and Crissy Field photography across multiple microsites, sometimes with different file names, sometimes without any alt-text at all. Smaller departments, including the Office of Early Care and Education on Golden Gate Avenue, operated with no dedicated web staff and relied on whoever was available to post content.

The result, by one internal estimate referenced in city documentation reviewed earlier this year, was a content management environment where a single photograph — say, an aerial view of the Ferry Building — might exist in more than a dozen slightly different compressed versions, scattered across servers with no consistent naming convention and no record of original licensing terms. The practical consequence: when sfgov.org's consolidation team began migrating departmental content to Drupal 10, which the city adopted as its standard CMS platform in late 2023, the duplicate image problem couldn't be automated away. Someone had to look at each one.

The Work of Cleaning It Up

The Office of Digital Services, headquartered at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place in the Civic Center complex, has assigned a content remediation team to work through the backlog using a combination of hash-matching software and manual review. The process is methodical and slow. Images flagged as duplicates are queued for replacement with photos sourced either from the city's own licensed library or from openly licensed repositories that meet sfgov's accessibility and metadata standards.

The San Francisco Public Library's digital collections on Larkin Street have also become a sourcing partner for historical imagery, particularly for departments whose pages cover neighborhood history or cultural programming. That partnership, informal as it currently stands, reflects a broader effort to reduce the city's dependence on stock-photo subscriptions that can cost several thousand dollars annually per departmental contract.

Civic tech advocates, including members of Code for San Francisco — the local brigade of the national Code for America network that meets in SoMa — have pushed the city to make its image asset library publicly accessible via API, so community developers building neighborhood apps or transit tools don't inadvertently replicate the same problem at a smaller scale.

For residents and small nonprofits that interact with city web content daily — a Tenderloin community health worker pulling up DPH vaccination schedules, a Mission District tenant rights clinic embedding city housing forms — the practical payoff of this unglamorous cleanup is faster pages, clearer images, and content that actually reflects current programs rather than 2020-era emergency graphics. The Office of Digital Services has set a target of completing the first full audit pass by the end of calendar year 2026, though the consolidation timeline has slipped before. The work continues regardless of the holiday weekend.