How San Francisco's City Websites Got Overrun With Duplicate Images — And What Happens Next

San Francisco's Department of Technology is moving to overhaul the image libraries underpinning dozens of city-run websites after an internal audit flagged widespread duplication across the municipal content management system — a problem that crept in over nearly a decade of agency-by-agency website growth and never got cleaned up.

The audit, completed earlier this year, found that multiple city departments had independently uploaded identical or near-identical photographs, graphics and banner images into their individual site instances, often without any shared repository or deduplication protocol. The result: bloated servers, slower page-load times for residents trying to access permits or benefits information, and mounting cloud storage bills drawn from a technology budget that the Board of Supervisors trimmed during the post-pandemic austerity rounds of fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

How the Problem Built Up Over Years

The roots run back to roughly 2017, when the city's Digital Services office — then operating out of City Hall under a vendor contract with a third-party CMS provider — began onboarding individual departments onto separate web environments rather than a unified platform. The logic at the time was flexibility: agencies from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency on South Van Ness to the Department of Public Health's Zuckerberg San Francisco General campus each had distinct content needs, distinct communications staff, and distinct timelines for going live.

What nobody built was a shared asset layer. A stock photograph of, say, the Ferry Building at dawn could exist in the media library of the Planning Department, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, SF Travel, and the Mayor's Office simultaneously — uploaded four separate times, stored four separate times, and served to browsers four separate times with no link between them. Multiply that pattern across hundreds of images and dozens of departments over eight years, and the redundancy compounds fast.

The problem accelerated during the COVID-19 period. Between 2020 and 2022, agencies rushed new informational pages online — vaccine sites, eviction moratorium explainers, small-business grant portals — often pulling image assets from whatever was at hand. Coordination between, say, the Human Services Agency offices on Otis Street and the Department of Emergency Management was minimal. Many temporary pages were never taken down, and their image files persisted in the system long after the relevant programs expired.

The Tech Shift That Made the Audit Unavoidable

Two forces converged in late 2025 to push the issue onto the Department of Technology's formal agenda. First, the city's migration toward a consolidated digital infrastructure — part of a broader modernization push accelerated by Mayor Daniel Lurie's transition team, which took office in January 2025 — required a full inventory of existing assets. Second, AI-assisted deduplication tools had dropped sharply in price, making it economical to run automated scans that would have been prohibitively manual just three years earlier. Several local govtech firms, including vendors with offices in the SoMa corridor along Folsom Street, pitched the city on machine-vision tooling capable of flagging visually similar images even when file names and metadata differed.

The scale of what those scans found surprised even the technicians running them. Across the city's major public-facing web properties, preliminary figures shared with the Board of Supervisors' Government Audits and Oversight Committee earlier this spring indicated that duplicate or near-duplicate images accounted for a significant share of stored media assets — driving up annual cloud expenditure that the city had been absorbing without systematic review.

The Department of Technology declined to release specific storage-cost figures ahead of a formal report expected this fall. But the committee was told the savings from deduplication could meaningfully offset hosting costs across the consolidated platform once the cleanup is complete.

For residents who use SF.gov to navigate services — whether filing for a building permit in the Excelsior or checking Muni delay alerts — the practical upside should be faster page loads and a more consistent visual experience as agencies move onto shared image libraries. The Department of Technology has set a target of completing the first phase of the asset consolidation by the end of the 2026 calendar year. Departments have been asked to designate a digital content lead by August 1 to coordinate the transition.