How San Francisco's City Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and Why It Took Years to Fix

San Francisco's digital housekeeping problem has been years in the making. Across the city's network of official web properties — from SF.gov and the Municipal Transportation Agency's public-facing pages to the Department of Public Health's community portals — thousands of duplicate images have accumulated, clogging content management systems, slowing page load times, and complicating accessibility compliance. City technology staff are now deep into a structured remediation effort to identify and replace the redundant files, a project that has quietly become one of the more unglamorous but consequential tasks inside the Department of Technology on Seventh Street.

The timing matters. San Francisco has spent the past three years pushing hard on digital equity and accessibility under its broader technology modernization agenda. As the city's homelessness response and fentanyl crisis programs have demanded faster, clearer public communication — through the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing's online resource guides and the Department of Public Health's Tenderloin Linkage Center information pages — the underlying quality of digital assets has come under sharper scrutiny. Duplicate images are not merely an aesthetic nuisance. They inflate file storage costs, confuse screen readers used by visually impaired residents, and create version-control chaos when staff need to update official materials quickly.

How the Problem Accumulated

The root cause is institutional and historical. San Francisco's web ecosystem expanded rapidly and without centralized coordination between roughly 2014 and 2022, as individual departments built out their own digital presences using a patchwork of vendors and content management platforms. The city's main SF.gov platform, which consolidated many departmental sites under the Salesforce-built infrastructure adopted during the London Breed administration's digital modernization push, inherited years of legacy content. Staff uploading photos for neighborhood programs in the Excelsior, public health bulletins for the Bayview, or transit updates for Caltrain integration simply uploaded new versions of images that already existed in the library — sometimes dozens of times over.

The SFMTA, which runs Muni and oversees the city's transit network, maintained its own separate image libraries for internal and public communications. The same photograph of a Market Street bus shelter, for example, could exist in six or seven slightly different file formats and resolutions across multiple folders, none of them formally linked. The Recreation and Parks Department faced a similar situation with its parks photography, particularly after the Golden Gate Park events expansion and the COVID-era pivot to digital program promotion.

Federal accessibility law adds urgency. Under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, federal funding recipients — which San Francisco is, across multiple departments — must ensure digital content meets accessibility standards. Duplicate images with inconsistent or missing alt-text descriptions fail those standards. The city's own Digital Accessibility Policy, updated in 2023, set a compliance benchmark requiring all public-facing web content to meet WCAG 2.1 AA criteria.

What Remediation Actually Looks Like

The Department of Technology has been running automated audits using content management tools that scan for hash-matched files — images that are digitally identical even if stored under different names or in different folders. Staff then flag candidates for consolidation, verify that no unique metadata is lost, and replace scattered instances with a single canonical file linked from a centralized asset library. For images that are outdated — old branding, pre-renovation photos of facilities like the reopened main branch of the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin Street — the process also triggers a content review cycle.

It is slow work. The city's digital estate is large, and the staff doing it are the same teams managing new content demands daily. The practical advice for any San Francisco resident who notices broken image placeholders or blurry placeholder graphics on city web pages right now: the remediation is active, and reporting specific broken links through the SF311 portal — which logs digital issues alongside pothole complaints — remains the fastest way to flag specific problems for the Department of Technology's web services team.

The broader lesson is about what happens when digital infrastructure is treated as a secondary concern during periods of rapid government expansion. San Francisco is not alone in this — cities from Chicago to New York have faced comparable web debt — but the fix, as the Seventh Street team has learned, requires patience, coordination across a dozen agencies, and a willingness to do unglamorous work that residents will never directly see.