How San Francisco's City Agencies Spent Years Paying Twice for the Same Stock Photos

San Francisco's Department of Technology flagged the problem in writing as far back as the spring of 2023: multiple city agencies were purchasing overlapping licenses for the same stock photography libraries, sometimes from the same vendor, sometimes in the same fiscal quarter. The finding landed in an internal procurement review that was never made public, but copies obtained by The Daily San Francisco through a California Public Records Act request show the duplication ran deeper than anyone had acknowledged.

The issue matters right now because the city is in the middle of a painful budget consolidation. Mayor Daniel Lurie took office in January 2026 pledging to close a structural deficit that city budget analysts had pegged at roughly $800 million over two years. Every line item is under review. Redundant software and media licensing — a category that includes stock image subscriptions — is suddenly not just a housekeeping problem but a political one.

The origins of the mess are not complicated, just unglamorous. During the early 2020s, San Francisco's municipal departments operated with what one procurement specialist, in a 2024 Budget and Legislative Analyst report, described as highly decentralized purchasing authority. The San Francisco Public Library system, the Department of Public Health, the Municipal Transportation Agency, and the Planning Department each maintained their own vendor relationships. Nobody was cross-checking. When remote work exploded after March 2020, communications teams across the Civic Center corridor started building out digital presences fast, snapping up subscriptions to services like Getty Images and Adobe Stock without clearing those purchases through a central registry.

The Paper Trail From Civic Center to the Mission

The Budget and Legislative Analyst's office, which is headquartered on Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place directly across from City Hall, published a technology procurement review in March 2024 that identified 14 departments holding active stock-image or digital-asset licenses with at least partial overlap. The review did not name specific dollar amounts by department, but noted the city-wide spend on stock media licensing had grown by more than 40 percent between fiscal year 2019-2020 and fiscal year 2022-2023.

Sf.gov, the unified web platform that launched in 2021 under the City's Digital Services team, was supposed to reduce exactly this kind of fragmentation. The platform consolidated dozens of legacy department websites under a single content management system, with a shared media library. The Digital Services office, based in the SoMa neighborhood near Fifth and Mission, built out a commons of public-domain and Creative Commons imagery specifically so departments would not need to buy commercial licenses for routine web content. By mid-2023, the shared library held more than 3,000 approved images. Despite that, procurement records show at least seven departments renewed commercial stock subscriptions in fiscal year 2023-2024 anyway, paying for content functionally duplicated by the free city library.

Part of the explanation is bureaucratic inertia. Subscription renewals on contracts under $10,000 in San Francisco can be approved at the department level without competitive bidding, under Administrative Code rules that were written long before cloud-based image subscriptions existed. A $9,500 annual Getty Images renewal, for instance, requires no Controller's Office sign-off and generates no automatic flag if an identical subscription exists two floors away in the same building.

Where Things Stand Heading Into Fiscal Year 2027

The Controller's Office confirmed in May 2026 that it is piloting a new software tool to identify duplicate vendor contracts across departments before renewal dates hit. The pilot covers 22 agencies and is expected to run through December 2026. If the tool performs as projected, the city estimates it could recover or avoid somewhere between $1.2 million and $3.4 million annually in redundant media and software licensing — though those figures have not been independently verified and represent the Controller's own modeling.

For San Franciscans watching the budget fight play out at City Hall this summer, the stock photo saga is a small but concrete illustration of how the city's fragmented administrative structure has generated waste for years. The fix is not dramatic: centralized purchasing authority, a shared asset registry, and mandatory cross-checks before renewals. None of that requires new legislation. It requires departments to actually talk to each other — which, in San Francisco's municipal culture, has historically been the hard part.