Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Define the City's Digital Heritage

Istanbul's municipal image libraries are riddled with duplicate photographs — the same building photographed twice under different file names, the same street scene filed under conflicting ownership records, the same heritage site sold to multiple licensees simultaneously. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Digital Heritage Archive, which holds more than 340,000 images spanning everything from the Galata Tower to the side streets of Balat, has acknowledged internally that a full audit of its catalogue has not been completed since 2021. What happens in the coming months will shape how the city manages, licenses, and protects its visual identity for the next decade.

The issue matters now for a specific reason: Turkey's Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works, last amended in 2022, placed new compliance obligations on public institutions holding digitised cultural assets. The deadline for municipalities to certify clean, deduplicated digital archives was set for January 2026. Istanbul — home to the densest concentration of World Heritage-listed sites in the country — missed it. That missed deadline has triggered a review by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which oversees heritage classification in cooperation with UNESCO. If the municipality cannot demonstrate progress by October 2026, licensing revenues from the archive, estimated internally at several million lira per year, could be frozen pending resolution.

Where the Problem Lives — and Who Owns It

The duplication crisis is most acute in two collections. The first is the Atatürk Library in Taksim, which digitised roughly 80,000 historic photographs between 2018 and 2022 under an EU-funded project. That project, run in partnership with the European Commission's Europeana initiative, produced high-resolution scans but applied inconsistent metadata standards — meaning thousands of images exist in the archive under two or three separate accession numbers with contradictory attribution. The second collection is held by IKSV, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, which licenses images of venues including Hagia Eirene and the Darphane-i Amire in Sultanahmet for promotional use. IKSV has flagged to the municipality that at least one batch of images it licensed exclusively in 2023 subsequently appeared in a competing commercial database.

The Bosphorus adds another layer. Development pressures along the strait — from Beşiktaş to Üsküdar — have made accurate, rights-clear architectural photography commercially valuable. Real estate developers routinely commission new shoots but then submit those images to municipal planning databases where automated ingestion systems have no deduplication filter. A single residential tower under construction near Arnavutköy has, according to planning documents reviewed by The Daily Istanbul, generated 47 separate image files in the municipal system, several of which carry different stated copyright holders.

The Decisions Ahead

Three options are now on the table, according to documentation circulating within the municipality's Directorate of Information Technologies. The first is a full AI-assisted deduplication sweep — a process the municipality piloted in the Kadıköy district archive in late 2025, clearing roughly 12,000 duplicate files in six weeks at a cost of approximately 2.3 million Turkish lira. Scaling that to the full 340,000-image collection would be substantially more expensive and would require external contractor support. The second option is a phased approach, prioritising UNESCO-listed sites first: Topkapı Palace, the Süleymaniye Mosque complex, and the land walls of Theodosian Constantinople. That would limit immediate legal exposure but leave the broader archive vulnerable. The third option — and the most contentious — is outsourcing the entire archive to a private digital asset management company, which would assume liability but also gain licensing rights.

Each path carries political risk. Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration has positioned digital transparency and heritage stewardship as signature commitments. Any outsourcing deal that hands a private company control over images of Istanbul's historic core would invite sharp criticism from opposition groups and civil society. A full in-house overhaul, meanwhile, demands budget that the municipality, squeezed by lira inflation running above 40 percent annually, may struggle to allocate without raiding other line items.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has not publicly set an enforcement deadline beyond the October review. But institutions with stakes in the outcome — IKSV, the Atatürk Library management, and heritage conservation groups including ÇEKÜL Foundation — are watching closely. The practical advice for photographers, researchers, and commercial licensees is straightforward: until the audit is complete, treat any image sourced from the Istanbul municipal archive as carrying unresolved rights status, and obtain secondary clearance from the originating institution before publication or broadcast.