Istanbul's Digital Archive Crisis: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying About Duplicate Image Replacement

Istanbul's major public archives are sitting on tens of thousands of duplicate, mislabelled and low-resolution images — and the institutions responsible for managing them cannot agree on who should fix it first. The problem has been building for years, but a series of internal reviews completed in the first half of 2026 by organisations including the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's cultural directorate and the Atatürk Library on Taksim Square have pushed the issue to the top of the agenda.

The timing matters. Turkey's broader digitisation push accelerated after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes exposed how quickly physical records can be destroyed without warning. Istanbul, sitting astride the North Anatolian Fault, faces the same risk. A single seismic event of sufficient magnitude could erase physical originals that currently exist only alongside degraded digital copies — rendering replacement images the only surviving record. That is the scenario archivists and urban historians are now describing in institutional briefings circulating among municipal departments.

What Institutions Are Recommending

The Atatürk Library, which holds one of the city's most significant photographic collections covering Ottoman-era Istanbul through the early Republican period, has been at the centre of the debate. Staff there have been working through a backlog of material catalogued under inconsistent naming conventions, a legacy of multiple digitisation campaigns run separately between 2008 and 2021. The core problem with duplicate image replacement is not simply deleting copies — it requires human verification that the replacement file is actually higher quality and correctly identified before the original scan is retired.

Experts at Istanbul Technical University's architecture faculty, which has its own extensive archive of Bosphorus development photography dating to the 1950s, have raised concerns about automated deduplication tools being applied without sufficient oversight. The worry, widely shared in the archival community, is that automated systems using perceptual hashing algorithms can flag as duplicates two images that are superficially similar but document different moments or different buildings — a particular hazard for photographs of the Üsküdar and Beşiktaş waterfronts, where Ottoman-era yalı structures were frequently rebuilt in nearly identical styles.

The Istanbul branch of ICOM, the International Council of Museums, held a working session on the issue in May 2026 at the Pera Museum in Beyoğlu. No binding resolution emerged, but participants agreed that a minimum resolution threshold of 600 dpi should apply to any replacement image before a lower-quality duplicate is formally retired from a collection. That standard is already used by the Topkapı Palace Museum archives but has not been adopted uniformly across city-managed repositories.

The Cost and the Clock

Budget is a central obstacle. Municipal cultural spending in Istanbul has been squeezed by inflation — the Turkish lira lost roughly 20 percent of its value against the dollar in 2025 alone, pushing up the cost of the specialised scanners and metadata management software that a proper replacement programme requires. The Metropolitan Municipality under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has allocated funding for broader digital infrastructure projects, but dedicated archive remediation has not featured as a named line item in publicly available budget documents reviewed for this article.

The practical consequence is that smaller district municipalities — including those covering Fatih, home to a dense concentration of Byzantine and Ottoman heritage sites — are making their own decisions about which duplicates to replace and which to leave, creating a patchwork of incompatible standards across the city's fragmented archival ecosystem.

What happens next depends partly on whether the Metropolitan Municipality's cultural directorate can establish a single set of technical standards that district institutions are required to follow. Archivists working in the sector say the window for doing this without major data loss is narrowing. The next practical step being discussed is a city-wide audit, modelled on a 2019 initiative that catalogued earthquake-vulnerable buildings in Zeytinburnu, which produced the kind of clear numerical baseline that funding applications require. Without a similar baseline for digital archives, Istanbul risks losing the visual record of its own transformation — not in a single dramatic moment, but through the quiet accumulation of files no one got around to fixing.