Istanbul's Crumbling Archive: The Race to Replace Duplicate Images Before the Record Is Lost

Istanbul's municipal archive holds more than four million photographs spanning the late Ottoman period to the early Republic, but a systematic audit completed last spring revealed a problem hiding in plain sight: an estimated 340,000 duplicate image files, many of them mislabelled or stored in degraded formats, are choking the database that cultural institutions, urban planners, and earthquake-resilience engineers all depend on. The question now is what replaces them — and who decides.

The timing is not incidental. Since the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes killed more than 50,000 people across southern Turkey, every major institution handling Istanbul's built environment has been under pressure to modernise its record-keeping. Structural engineers assessing older buildings in Fatih and Balat need accurate, non-duplicated photographic baselines to model seismic vulnerability. When an archive contains multiple conflicting versions of the same image — tagged with different dates, different resolution specs, or different location metadata — the document becomes legally and technically unreliable. That is the situation city archivists are now trying to untangle before the next major audit deadline in October 2026.

What the Cleanup Actually Involves

The İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi — the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality — assigned the deduplication project to its digital services directorate in early 2025. The task has two distinct phases. Phase one, now largely complete, involved automated scanning to flag probable duplicates across the archive's primary server cluster, housed at the municipality's data centre in Kagıthane. Phase two — the harder part — requires human review of flagged files, a decision on which version to designate as the canonical record, and a metadata correction protocol that satisfies both the municipality's own standards and the requirements of the national Cultural Heritage Information System managed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ankara.

The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, known as İKSV, and the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilisations at Koç University in Beyoğlu have both been drawn into adjacent conversations about how deduplicated records get shared with academic and cultural users once the cleanup is done. Neither institution controls the municipal archive, but both rely on it for exhibition research and conservation planning. The protocols that govern access after deduplication — who can request a canonical file, what fee applies, how long corrections take — have not yet been finalised.

Key Decisions Still Outstanding

Three choices will shape what happens in the next six months. First, the municipality must decide whether to adopt an open-licence framework for the cleaned archive, which would allow universities and NGOs to access deduplicated images without per-file charges, or maintain the current system where institutional users pay a processing fee that reached 850 Turkish lira per image request in the most recent tariff schedule. With the lira's ongoing volatility — the exchange rate has fluctuated between 38 and 42 lira to the dollar through the first half of 2026 — that fee structure creates unpredictable costs for long-term research projects.

Second, the municipality must choose a storage standard for the replacement files. The current archive mixes TIFF, high-resolution JPEG, and legacy BMP formats accumulated over three decades of inconsistent digitisation. Archivists have recommended a uniform TIFF-plus-compressed-JPEG dual-format system, which would roughly double storage requirements but eliminate the format-mismatch errors that account for nearly a third of the duplicate problem in the first place. The Kagıthane server upgrade needed to accommodate that expansion has an estimated cost that city budget documents, reviewed by The Daily Istanbul, place in the 12 to 15 million lira range — a figure subject to tender review.

Third, and most politically sensitive, is the question of governance. The deduplication audit was initiated under the current CHP-led municipal administration, and some of its recommendations touch on how the archive interacts with national-level bodies controlled by the central government. Reaching agreement on data-sharing protocols between the municipality and Ankara ministries has proven slow in the past. The October deadline is real, but meeting it depends on cooperation that runs across a political fault line that has defined Istanbul's administrative life for years.

Heritage groups working in neighbourhoods like Fener and Kuzguncuk have been told informally that public consultations on the new access policy will begin in September. Whether those consultations happen on schedule, and whether their results feed into the final protocol before the October deadline, are the questions archivists, engineers, and researchers across the city are now watching closely.