How Seattle's City Website Ended Up With Thousands of Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Seattle's official city website is carrying thousands of duplicate image files spread across its departmental pages — a digital clutter problem that has built up quietly over more than a decade of fragmented content management and is now forcing the city's Department of Information Technology to undertake a systematic cleanup of Seattle.gov's media library.

The issue matters now because the city is midway through a broader Seattle.gov redesign effort, with the Office of the Chief Technology Officer targeting a phased relaunch that began rolling out to pilot departments in early 2026. Cleaning up duplicate images is a prerequisite for migrating content into the new Drupal-based content management system without dragging legacy problems into fresh infrastructure. Leave the duplicates in place, and the new site inherits the same sluggish load times and broken internal links that have dogged the old one.

How the Duplication Happened

The roots of the problem go back to at least 2012, when the city decentralized its web publishing model and gave individual departments — from Seattle Public Utilities to the Seattle Office of Housing — the ability to upload and manage their own media assets without a shared asset library. Over the following years, staff turnover meant the same photograph of, say, City Hall on Fifth Avenue or the Municipal Tower lobby might be uploaded fresh by a new communications staffer who had no way of knowing the file already existed somewhere else on the server. Budget cycles, reorganizations, and the shift to remote work after 2020 made coordination between, for example, the Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle Parks and Recreation even harder.

The problem compounded when departments began building microsites for specific programs — the 2023 Stay Healthy Streets expansion, the Comprehensive Plan update process, the various neighborhood-specific pages for areas like the Chinatown-International District or South Park — each pulling images independently. A single photograph of the Ship Canal or a stock headshot of a community meeting could exist in dozens of slightly different file sizes and naming conventions scattered across subdirectories.

A 2024 internal audit by Seattle IT — findings shared in a public presentation to the City Council's Finance and Housing Committee — identified more than 40,000 image files across Seattle.gov's content management backend, with an estimated 30 to 40 percent flagged as probable or confirmed duplicates. That level of redundancy contributed to page load times that, on some departmental pages, ran above eight seconds on a standard broadband connection, well above the federal accessibility guidance threshold of three seconds that the city's own digital standards reference.

The Path to a Fix

The replacement and deduplication work is being handled in stages. The city's web team, based out of the Seattle Municipal Tower at 700 Fifth Avenue, is using automated scripts to identify files with matching hash values — essentially digital fingerprints — and flag them for human review before deletion. The goal is to consolidate surviving images into a centralized Digital Asset Management system that all departments can search before uploading anything new.

Departments with the highest page traffic are being prioritized first. Seattle Public Utilities and the Seattle Police Department's public-facing pages were among the first to go through the process in spring 2026. Seattle Parks and Recreation, which manages hundreds of facility pages from Green Lake to Jefferson Park, is scheduled for the summer cycle.

For residents, the practical upshot is faster page loads and fewer broken image links on city pages — particularly on mobile, where much of the traffic to Seattle.gov now originates. The city's own analytics showed mobile visits accounting for roughly 58 percent of Seattle.gov sessions in 2025.

Longer term, the centralized asset library is supposed to prevent the duplication from recurring by requiring staff to search existing files before uploading. Whether that discipline holds across dozens of departments will depend on training, enforced workflow rules, and whether the new CMS makes the search function genuinely easy to use. The OCTO has said it plans to publish updated web governance standards later this year, which would set mandatory protocols for image uploads city-wide.