Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Istanbul's municipal digital archive contains tens of thousands of duplicate and misidentified images — photographs of heritage buildings, planning documents and neighbourhood surveys filed under the wrong addresses, the wrong dates, or simply filed twice — and the people responsible for fixing that problem say the city does not yet have a coherent plan to do so.

The issue has moved from a bureaucratic footnote to an active concern because of timing. The İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi, the city's metropolitan municipality, is midway through a major GIS-linked digitisation project covering the historic peninsula and Beyoğlu district. That project, which began in earnest in early 2025, is meant to serve as the authoritative visual reference for earthquake-resilience assessments — work that acquired urgency after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş disaster exposed how poorly documented Istanbul's older building stock actually was.

A Problem With Real Consequences

Duplicate images are not just a filing inconvenience. When a building in Balat or Fener appears under two different cadastral codes, or when a photograph taken after a 2019 restoration is indexed alongside a pre-restoration image with no date flag, engineers conducting seismic vulnerability assessments can draw incorrect conclusions about a structure's current condition. Preservation specialists affiliated with the Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture have raised this concern in internal working sessions with municipal teams, according to documentation reviewed by The Daily Istanbul. No public statement from ITU has been issued on the matter.

The Fatih Municipality, which administers the historic peninsula and operates separately from the larger metropolitan body on some administrative tasks, has acknowledged that image duplication in its own district records is a known issue. Staff there have been working since March 2026 to cross-reference the municipal photo library against the KUDEB cultural heritage database — the unit responsible for approving restoration work on registered buildings. Progress has been slow. The district covers more than 1,500 registered historic structures.

Private-sector voices are also being heard. The Turkish Chamber of Architects' Istanbul branch has pushed for a standardised metadata protocol, arguing that without a unified tagging system — one that links each image to a building's UAVT address code, a precise capture date, and the name of the documenting body — duplication will simply re-accumulate after any cleanup effort. The chamber has been making this argument to municipal bodies for at least two years, with limited visible result.

What Needs to Happen, and When

The GIS digitisation project covering Sultanahmet and the areas around the Grand Bazaar is scheduled for a first-phase review in the autumn of 2026. That review will be the earliest practical moment for municipal teams to implement a deduplication protocol before the archive grows further. Planners involved in the project have indicated — without making formal announcements — that artificial intelligence-assisted image matching tools are under evaluation, though no procurement decision has been reported publicly.

The stakes are sharpest in areas already flagged as high seismic risk. A 2024 municipal assessment identified roughly 90,000 buildings across Istanbul as in need of urgent structural review, a figure the İBB itself has cited in public communications. Reliable photographic documentation is foundational to prioritising that work. If the image archive feeding into those assessments contains duplicates or misdated files, the prioritisation ranking itself becomes unreliable.

For residents of Zeyrek, Tarlabaşı and other dense older neighbourhoods watching the digitisation work proceed building by building, the practical advice from preservationists is blunt: if a municipal survey team photographs your property, ask for a copy of the reference code they assign to the images. That code — ideally cross-checked against the land registry — is the clearest way to verify that your building is correctly represented in the archive, and not silently doubled, misdated, or lost under a neighbouring address.