Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Visual Future

Istanbul's official image archives are in a mess. Tens of thousands of duplicate and misattributed photographs — many of them near-identical drone shots of the Golden Horn or stock images of the Galata Tower recycled across municipal websites, tourism portals, and heritage databases — have accumulated to the point where administrators at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) can no longer guarantee which version of an image is the authoritative one. The IBB's digital content unit flagged the duplication problem internally earlier this year, and the decisions made in the coming months will determine whether the city's visual record becomes a usable public asset or an expensive liability.

The timing matters. Turkey's tourism sector is heading into its most competitive autumn marketing season in years, with rival destinations across the Aegean and the Adriatic pushing heavily curated, rights-cleared image libraries to attract post-summer visitors. For Istanbul, which welcomed more than 20 million foreign visitors in 2024 according to figures published by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), a fragmented and legally murky photo archive creates real commercial and legal exposure. Travel platforms pulling images without clear licensing trace, heritage researchers working on Ottoman-era documentation projects, and municipal communications teams producing Bosphorus development materials are all drawing from the same polluted pool.

Where the Problem Lives and Who Owns It

The duplication is concentrated in three overlapping systems. The IBB's own media library, maintained out of its communications directorate on Kemalpaşa Caddesi in Fatih, holds an estimated archive that has grown without systematic deduplication since at least 2018. Separately, the Istanbul Development Agency (İSTKA) runs a regional promotion image bank that feeds content to tourism offices in Beyoğlu and to the Directorate General of Promotion under the Culture and Tourism Ministry. A third stream flows through the platform managed by the Turkish Photography Foundation (Türkiye Fotoğraf Vakfı), which licenses contemporary documentary work but has seen dozens of its images duplicated without attribution on municipal social media channels.

The practical consequence is a legal grey zone. When the same image of, say, the Süleymaniye Mosque courtyard exists in four different resolutions under three different file names across two institutional servers, nobody can confirm at a glance which copy carries a clean rights chain. For images taken before 2015, Turkish copyright law — specifically the Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works, No. 5846 — creates additional complexity around moral rights that do not expire with economic rights. Photographers and their estates retain the right to be named even when the economic licence has lapsed or been transferred, a rule that digital archivists in Karaköy-based design studios say is routinely ignored in bulk upload workflows.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices are now pressing. First, who leads the deduplication effort — the IBB communications directorate, İSTKA, or an independent body? The IBB under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has signalled interest in open-data infrastructure projects, and a consolidated, publicly accessible image library would fit that agenda politically. But without a formal memorandum of understanding with the Culture Ministry, which controls significant portions of the Ottoman-era photographic record held at the Topkapı Palace Museum archives, any IBB-led effort will have gaps.

Second, what technology standard applies? The international IPTC metadata framework, adopted by news agencies including Reuters and AFP, allows for machine-readable rights and attribution data embedded directly in image files. Several European cities, including Amsterdam and Vienna, migrated their municipal archives to IPTC-compliant systems between 2021 and 2024. Istanbul has no declared timeline for equivalent adoption.

Third, how are legacy duplicates handled? Deleting them risks destroying provenance chains that researchers need. Leaving them in place perpetuates the confusion. Archivists at the Atatürk Library in Taksim, which holds the largest municipal photograph collection in the city, have proposed a quarantine-and-tag model used successfully by the Library of Congress for its digitisation backlogs — but that proposal is still awaiting a formal response.

The next concrete decision point arrives in September, when İSTKA's annual regional development grant cycle opens. Organisations can apply for funding that covers digital infrastructure projects, and a coordinated bid from the IBB, the Turkish Photography Foundation, and the Atatürk Library could put real money behind a solution that has so far been discussed but never resourced. The window to shape that application closes well before the summer ends.