Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Barcelona and Seoul

Istanbul's major cultural repositories are sitting on tens of thousands of duplicate digital images — redundant scans, mirror-uploaded photographs and replicated heritage files that are clogging storage servers, inflating archive budgets and making public search tools slower and less reliable. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's digital heritage unit, operating under the broader smart-city initiative launched in 2023, has been working to address the problem. Progress, by most measures, is uneven.

The issue matters now because the city is in the middle of a significant digitisation push. The Istanbul Archaeological Museums, which hold more than one million registered objects across their Sultanahmet complex, completed a bulk digitisation drive between 2023 and 2025 that ingested hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images into a central database. The İBB (Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi) open-data portal, relaunched in early 2025, pulled in photographic records from dozens of district municipalities. Where no deduplication protocol existed, duplicates multiplied.

What Other Cities Have Done

The comparison with peer cities is instructive. The British Museum in London deployed automated perceptual-hash deduplication across its online collection in 2022, reducing redundant image entries by roughly 34 percent within 18 months, according to the museum's published digital strategy report. Barcelona's Arxiu Municipal de Barcelona — the city's official municipal archive on Carrer de Santa Llúcia — integrated AI-assisted duplicate detection into its Albalá records management system starting in 2021, cutting storage overhead and allowing archivists to redirect roughly 1,200 staff-hours annually toward metadata enrichment. Seoul's National Folk Museum completed a similar exercise across its digital image library in 2023, clearing more than 80,000 redundant files from a collection of approximately 420,000 photographs.

Istanbul's heritage institutions have not yet published equivalent figures. The Archaeological Museums have not released a public statement on the scale of the duplicate problem or a timeline for resolving it. The Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Hasköy, which maintains its own digital catalogue of industrial and maritime artefacts, confirmed in its 2024 annual review that it was evaluating deduplication software but had not yet committed to a specific vendor or rollout date.

The structural challenge in Istanbul is coordination. Unlike London, where the Collections Trust sets cross-institutional data standards that many major museums voluntarily adopt, Istanbul's cultural institutions largely operate independent digital infrastructures. The İBB smart-city directorate has the technical ambition — its 2025-2030 digital transformation roadmap includes provisions for shared cloud storage across municipal units — but museums under the national Culture Ministry are not automatically bound by municipal data governance frameworks. That gap leaves archive managers solving the same deduplication problem separately, on separate budgets, using different tools.

Practical Pressure on the Ground

The Beyoğlu district's network of smaller gallery spaces and project archives — including the SALT Galata research centre on Bankalar Caddesi — have been quicker to adopt standardised digital asset management practices. SALT's open-access image repository, linked to its physical Galata location near Karaköy, uses a system that flags duplicate uploads at the point of ingestion. The model is more agile precisely because SALT operates at smaller scale than a national-level museum, but it demonstrates that the technical solution is not exotic or expensive.

Storage costs are not trivial. Commercial cloud storage rates for cultural institutions in Turkey have risen alongside the lira's sustained depreciation; institutions paying in dollars or euros for international cloud services have seen effective costs increase substantially since 2022. That financial pressure is itself an argument for deduplication — redundant files mean redundant bills. An archive holding 50,000 duplicate high-resolution TIF files, each averaging 80 megabytes, is carrying roughly four terabytes of entirely unnecessary data.

What happens next depends largely on whether the İBB digital unit and the Culture Ministry find a workable joint framework before the next major digitisation tranche begins. The municipality's open-data portal is scheduled for a further content expansion in the fourth quarter of 2026, pulling in records from the Fatih and Üsküdar districts. Without a deduplication standard agreed before that ingestion, the problem gets larger. Archivists at institutions that have already done the work — SALT Galata being the clearest local example — say the technical lift is manageable. The harder part, consistently, is getting institutions that answer to different authorities to agree on anything at all.