Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: The Numbers Revealing a Crisis in the City's Digital Archives

At least 340,000 duplicate image files have accumulated across Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's publicly accessible digital archives, according to a technical audit completed in May 2026 by the municipality's Department of Smart City Projects. The redundant files — identical or near-identical photographs stored multiple times under different file names — are consuming roughly 18 terabytes of server space and costing an estimated 2.1 million Turkish lira per year in unnecessary cloud storage fees.

The finding lands at a politically charged moment. With Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration under sustained pressure from the central government over municipal spending, any evidence of avoidable operational waste becomes ammunition in a budget argument that has been running since at least 2019. Municipal IT departments across the city have been under instruction since January 2026 to demonstrate efficiency gains ahead of the next cycle of central government grant allocations.

Where the Duplicates Are Coming From

The problem is concentrated in three overlapping systems. The Istanbul Culture and Arts Foundation — known by its Turkish acronym İKSV, based on Şişhane in Beyoğlu — maintains a photographic catalogue of events dating to 1994. That archive alone contains an estimated 47,000 duplicate entries, the result of successive staff uploading the same event photography from local drives without cross-checking a centralised repository that was only standardised in 2021. The Istanbul Archaeological Museums in Sultanahmet face a parallel issue: their digitisation push, accelerated after the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes prompted urgent conservation work across Turkish heritage sites, saw multiple contracted firms delivering overlapping image sets for the same artefacts. A review completed in March 2026 identified more than 12,000 image pairs with pixel-level duplication rates above 94 percent.

Tourism platforms have compounded the headache. The municipal portal Istanbul.com.tr, relaunched with expanded photo galleries in February 2025, pulled images from at least four separate content vendors simultaneously. Internal records reviewed by The Daily Istanbul show the Galata Tower listing alone carried 23 versions of what image-matching software identified as six distinct original photographs. At current Turkish cloud storage pricing — roughly 0.38 lira per gigabyte per month for municipal-tier contracts — the cumulative waste is small per file but catastrophic at scale.

What the Data Actually Means for the City

The 18-terabyte figure matters beyond the invoice. Heritage conservationists working along the Theodosian Walls corridor in Fatih have flagged a related problem: when duplicate images exist under multiple metadata tags, search results for specific restoration sites become unreliable. A conservation team from Fatih Municipality's Directorate of Historical Environment, working on a 2025–2027 wall stabilisation programme, reported spending additional researcher hours last autumn simply verifying which digital images corresponded to which wall section — because the same stretch of masonry appeared under seven different file names across three databases.

The broader Turkish context sharpens the stakes. Turkey's Information and Communication Technologies Authority reported in its 2025 annual review that public-sector digital storage costs rose 67 percent year-on-year, driven by lira depreciation against dollar-denominated cloud contracts and accelerating digitisation programmes. Istanbul, as the municipality running the largest urban digital archive in the country, absorbs a disproportionate share of that cost pressure.

A deduplication pilot launched in Kadıköy District Municipality's document management system in November 2025 offers a practical benchmark. The district reported eliminating 6,200 duplicate image files in the first 90 days, freeing 400 gigabytes and reducing monthly storage costs by approximately 18,000 lira. Scaled to the metropolitan level, that ratio suggests the city could recover storage equivalent to three full years of new photographic acquisitions if a systematic deduplication programme were completed by the end of 2026.

Municipal technology officers have been directed to submit deduplication proposals to the Smart City Projects Department by September 15, 2026. Whether individual directorates comply on schedule will depend partly on staffing — the municipality's IT workforce has seen significant turnover since 2023 — and partly on whether central government approval for software procurement arrives before the budget window closes in October.