How San Francisco's City Agencies Spent Years Paying for the Same Photos Twice — and What Finally Changed

San Francisco city departments have been quietly reckoning with a decades-old problem that costs taxpayers real money: the routine purchase, upload, and licensing of duplicate stock photography across agencies that never talked to one another. The issue, sometimes called duplicate image replacement, moved from a back-office nuisance to a formal procurement concern after a 2024 audit of the Department of Technology flagged redundant digital asset spending across at least eleven municipal departments.

The timing matters. The city is under pressure to trim operational costs while simultaneously modernizing its digital infrastructure. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who took office in January 2025, inherited a budget gap that City Controller Greg Wagner's office has put in the hundreds of millions of dollars range for the coming fiscal year. Every redundant licensing fee, however small in isolation, adds up when multiplied across the Planning Department on Spear Street, SFMTA's communications shop at 1 South Van Ness, and the roughly four dozen other agencies that maintain their own web presences and publication workflows.

How the Duplication Problem Took Root

The roots go back to the mid-2000s, when departments began building out individual websites with little central coordination. Each agency contracted separately with stock image libraries — Getty, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock — often licensing the same photograph of the Bay Bridge or the Ferry Building multiple times over because there was no shared catalog and no policy requiring a search of what the city already held. By the time the Civic Bridge program and the city's Digital Services team began pushing for unified platforms around 2018 and 2019, siloed procurement habits were already embedded in department cultures.

The problem compounded during the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2022, agencies rushed to refresh websites and produce digital communications without the usual layers of interdepartmental sign-off. Spending on external creative assets spiked. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the Recreation and Parks Department, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development each expanded their digital footprint during this period, sometimes pulling from the same image pools without realizing it.

A complicating factor was the city's reliance on contractors. Many of the web design and communications firms hired through the City Administrator's Office brought their own preferred asset subscriptions to projects, then handed off sites containing licensed images that the city could not legally reuse once the contract ended. Departments were sometimes left paying for replacement images of scenes — Dolores Park on a sunny afternoon, the Salesforce Transit Center atrium — they had effectively already licensed under a previous vendor arrangement.

The Push Toward a Centralized Asset Library

The Department of Technology began piloting a shared digital asset management system in late 2024, working with a handful of departments including SF Environment and the Office of the Treasurer. The idea is straightforward: before any department purchases or uploads a new image, staff run it against a central repository to check for existing equivalents. The system uses perceptual hashing — a form of image fingerprinting — to catch near-duplicate photographs even when file names and metadata differ.

Early results, shared internally but not yet released publicly, suggested the pilot departments reduced new image acquisition by a meaningful margin in the first two quarters. The Department of Technology has not published specific cost savings figures, but the program is expected to expand to BART-adjacent city communications and the Human Services Agency by the end of 2026.

For anyone filing public records requests or working on city contracts, the practical implication is clear: procurement officers are now required under a July 2025 administrative bulletin to certify that a digital asset search was completed before any new image licensing agreement over $500 is approved. The bulletin covers all departments reporting to the Mayor's Office.

The broader lesson San Francisco is absorbing is an unglamorous but consequential one. Digital housekeeping — tagging, cataloging, retiring orphaned assets — is infrastructure work, the same as repaving a street or replacing a Muni rail switch. It costs money to do and costs more money to ignore. The city has chosen, belatedly, to pay attention.