How São Paulo's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of the Same Photo Twice — and What It Cost the City

São Paulo's city government is deep into an unglamorous but expensive project: hunting down duplicate images embedded across dozens of municipal digital platforms and replacing or purging them. The effort, centred on databases managed by the Secretaria Municipal de Gestão (SMG) and the urban planning body SP Urbanismo, has surfaced a problem years in the making — one that inflated storage costs, slowed public-facing portals, and repeatedly fed citizens the wrong photograph of a permit, a property, or a public work.

The scale of the problem reflects how São Paulo digitised in waves rather than in one coherent push. Through the mid-2010s, individual secretariats uploaded documents and images independently, with no shared metadata standard. The results were predictable: the same aerial photograph of Parelheiros, the southernmost subprefecture, might sit in three separate folders across two different servers, each tagged with a different file name and date stamp. Multiply that across 32 subprefeituras and a decade of uploads and the redundancy adds up fast.

How the Duplication Took Root

The roots of the problem trace back at least to 2013, when the then-administration launched a push to digitise property inspection records across the city. Contractors working district by district — often under separate procurement contracts — scanned the same boundary maps and infrastructure images multiple times without cross-referencing what had already been uploaded. Bairros like Itaim Bibi and Vila Madalena, which saw heavy zoning activity during that period, ended up with particularly dense duplicate image clusters.

The problem compounded in 2020 and 2021, when pandemic-era remote-work mandates pushed dozens of departments to hastily migrate paper workflows online. Agencies working out of the old Palácio das Indústrias complex on Parque Dom Pedro II, for instance, transferred physical archives without first auditing for overlaps. São Paulo's own open-data portal, Dados Abertos SP, began surfacing duplicate georeferenced images in public datasets — an embarrassment that drew quiet complaints from researchers at USP's Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, which regularly pulls municipal data for urban studies.

Tech procurement records reviewed by this newspaper show the city spent approximately R$ 4.7 million between 2019 and 2023 on cloud storage expansion — a portion of which IT managers later acknowledged internally was driven by redundant file accumulation rather than genuine data growth. The figure comes from SMG procurement summaries published on the Diário Oficial do Município. Storage costs aside, duplicates caused operational headaches: the Nota Fiscal Paulistana portal displayed the wrong vendor image on at least two separate occasions flagged in user-complaint logs from 2022.

The Current Cleanup and Where It Stands

Mayor Ricardo Nunes's administration launched a formal duplicate-image replacement protocol in late 2025, embedded inside a broader data-governance reform called Programa SP Digital Eficiente. The program tasks SMG's Coordenadoria de Tecnologia da Informação with running hash-based deduplication scans across 14 priority databases. The first phase covered property and permit imagery linked to the online portal Alvará Fácil, which processes building licences for addresses across the city including the congested Brás and Mooca corridors.

Progress has been uneven. Departments with recently modernised systems — including the transit authority SPTrans — completed their deduplication audits by March 2026. Others, particularly those still running legacy infrastructure inherited from pre-2017 IT contracts, remain months behind schedule. Civil society groups monitoring municipal transparency, including Transparência SP, have flagged the delays on their public dashboard but have not yet issued a formal report on the program's outcomes.

For residents and businesses that interact with the city's digital services regularly — filing permits on Paulista Avenue, tracking public works near Pinheiros, or accessing georeferenced flood-risk data ahead of the summer rains — the practical advice is straightforward: if a municipal portal displays an image that appears mismatched to a document, screenshot the discrepancy and submit a complaint through the 156 SP service line. The deduplication team is prioritising records flagged through user reports. The bureaucratic tangle that created this problem took a decade to build; the cleanup, by the city's own internal estimates, will take until at least mid-2027 to complete.