How Denver's City Websites Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What It Took to Get Here

Denver's official city websites are carrying thousands of duplicate images across their content management systems — a digital clutter problem that has quietly grown since at least 2018, when the city migrated dozens of departmental sites onto a unified platform managed through Denver's Department of Technology Services. The redundancy now affects portals ranging from Denver Parks and Recreation to the Denver Community Planning and Development office, and city IT staff have been tasked this summer with a structured cleanup effort before a broader web modernisation push begins in earnest later this year.

The issue matters right now because Denver is mid-contract with a web services vendor and facing a renewal decision before the end of Q3 2026. Carrying bloated digital asset libraries inflates storage costs, slows page-load times, and complicates the accessibility audits that city departments are required to complete under Colorado's revised digital accessibility standards. Getting the duplicate content under control is, essentially, a prerequisite for anything that comes next.

How the Problem Built Up

The roots of the duplication problem trace back to the period between roughly 2016 and 2021, when Denver was consolidating what had been an archipelago of independently maintained departmental websites. Denver Health, Denver Public Works, and the Denver Office of Emergency Management each ran their own web operations, often with their own image libraries and no shared naming conventions. When content was migrated into the centralised Drupal-based system, images frequently came with it multiple times — once from the original upload, once from a page-level import, and sometimes again from a staff member re-uploading a file they couldn't locate in the shared library.

The Denver Office of the Chief Information Officer flagged the problem formally in a 2023 internal audit, which found that the city's digital asset management practices lacked consistent deduplication protocols. By that point, certain stock photographs — the familiar shots of the 16th Street Mall pedestrian corridor, Red Rocks Amphitheatre at sunset, and Civic Center Park during the annual Taste of Colorado festival — existed in some departmental folders in six or more near-identical versions. Different file names, slightly different crop ratios, same underlying image.

Staff turnover accelerated the sprawl. Denver's Department of Technology Services processed more than 40 open positions in the two years following the pandemic, according to city budget documents from fiscal year 2022-23. With institutional knowledge walking out the door, newer employees defaulted to uploading fresh copies of images rather than searching a library that offered no reliable search-by-content function.

What a Fix Actually Requires

Duplicate image replacement is more technically involved than it sounds. Simply deleting redundant files breaks the hyperlinks embedded in older pages — a problem that creates 404 errors and can send users on denvergov.org into dead ends. The correct approach involves identifying the canonical version of each image, redirecting all existing references to that single file, and then removing the copies. For a system the size of Denver's consolidated web presence, that process has to be semi-automated, and the city has been piloting a tool through its contract with a Denver-based digital services firm to handle the matching and redirect-mapping at scale.

The Parks and Recreation department, whose pages cover everything from Washington Park to the Montbello Recreation Center, began its own deduplication pass in April 2026 as a pilot. Early results showed that roughly 30 percent of images in that department's library were duplicates or near-duplicates — a figure that, if representative of the broader city system, points to a substantial cleanup job ahead.

For residents and community organisations that interact with city websites daily — submitting permits through Denver Community Planning and Development, checking facility hours for the Denver Botanic Gardens, or accessing public meeting agendas — the practical payoff will be faster-loading pages and fewer broken links. City IT staff have set an internal target of completing the bulk of the deduplication work by October 2026, ahead of the vendor contract renewal window. Whether the timeline holds will depend largely on how well the automated tooling performs once it moves beyond the Parks pilot and into the larger, messier corners of the city's digital estate.