How Istanbul's Image Archives Became a Bureaucratic Battleground: The Story Behind Duplicate Image Replacement

Istanbul's municipal digital archive holds tens of thousands of photographs — of the Galata Tower, the ferries on the Bosphorus, the Grand Bazaar's arched corridors — and a significant portion of them are duplicates. Some images appear four, five, even a dozen times under different file names, different metadata tags, and different licensing classifications. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's communications directorate began a formal audit of the problem in early 2025, and what it found has since shaped a quiet but consequential overhaul of how the city manages its own visual identity.

The timing matters. Istanbul drew roughly 20 million foreign visitors in 2024, according to figures published by the Turkish Statistical Institute, and the city's promotional image library feeds everything from Tourism Ministry campaigns to neighbourhood redevelopment brochures produced by district municipalities in Beyoğlu and Kadıköy. When the same photograph of the Süleymaniye Mosque shows up in a heritage preservation report, a real estate advertisement, and a refugee integration programme flyer — each with contradictory copyright notations — the legal exposure alone is significant, city planners have acknowledged in public briefings.

How the Mess Was Made

The roots of the problem stretch back to at least 2009, when the municipality first contracted out large-scale digitisation of its photographic holdings. That initial project was managed under a now-defunct unit within the IBB — the Istanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi — and produced a library of roughly 80,000 images, many scanned from analogue originals held at the Atatürk Library in Beyazıt. A second, separately funded digitisation drive followed in 2016, this time coordinated partly through the Istanbul Development Agency, known by its Turkish acronym ISTKA. The two databases were never merged. Staff in different departments simply used whichever archive they had access to, uploading new photographs into both systems without cross-referencing what already existed.

The political churn of the past decade compounded the disorder. After Ekrem İmamoğlu won the Istanbul mayoral election in 2019 — a result annulled and then confirmed by a re-run — incoming CHP-aligned staff inherited AKP-era file structures they had no documentation for. Entire folder hierarchies were renamed. Metadata fields were reformatted. Some images that had been properly licensed under Creative Commons agreements lost their attribution tags entirely during the migration, creating fresh copyright ambiguity for photographs that had previously been clean.

What a Fix Actually Looks Like

The current deduplication project is centred at the municipality's digital services hub on Kemalpaşa Caddesi in Fatih, where a team of twelve archivists and software engineers has been working since March 2025. Their tool of choice is perceptual hashing — an algorithm that compares images not by file name or size but by visual content, flagging near-identical photographs even when they have been cropped, colour-corrected, or saved at different resolutions. As of April 2026, the team had processed approximately 140,000 files and identified more than 34,000 duplicate or near-duplicate pairs, according to a progress summary presented at an IBB digital governance panel held at the Haliç Congress Centre in February.

The replacement protocol is not simply deletion. Each duplicate set must be reviewed by a human archivist who confirms which version holds the highest resolution, the cleanest licensing record, and the most accurate location metadata. The surviving image is then tagged with a standardised geolocation code aligned with Istanbul's 39 official district boundaries, making it searchable by neighbourhood for the first time. Images linked to earthquake-risk zone documentation — a category that grew substantially after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş disaster prompted a fresh audit of structurally vulnerable buildings in districts like Avcılar and Bağcılar — are being prioritised in the first phase of the cleanup.

For organisations outside the municipality — tour operators working out of Sultanahmet, heritage NGOs like ÇEKÜL Foundation, journalists pulling stock images on deadline — the practical advice from the IBB's communications office is to wait until the new unified portal launches, currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026, before relying on archived municipal imagery for publication. Until then, the old databases remain live, the duplicates remain in them, and the licensing confusion remains unresolved.