Istanbul's Duplicate Image Crisis: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Digital Heritage Archive

Istanbul's push to build a comprehensive digital record of its historic neighbourhoods has hit a concrete obstacle: thousands of duplicate, mislabelled and conflicting images lodged across municipal servers are undermining the reliability of databases that planners, architects and heritage bodies depend on every day. The question now is who cleans them up, who pays, and what standard governs the work going forward.

The problem did not emerge overnight. Since 2021, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality — operating under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration — has run parallel digitisation drives through at least two separate departments, producing overlapping image libraries that were never reconciled. The Urban Transformation Directorate and the Cultural Heritage Documentation Unit both captured streetscape records of neighbourhoods including Balat, Karaköy and Fatih, often photographing the same façades within weeks of each other with no shared metadata protocol. The result is a swelling archive that confuses rather than clarifies.

Why the Timing Is Now Critical

The stakes rose sharply after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, which killed more than 53,000 people across southern Turkey and forced urban authorities in Istanbul — sitting atop the North Anatolian Fault — to accelerate building-risk assessments. Accurate, deduplicated imagery is not a bureaucratic nicety; it underpins structural surveys, insurance valuations and evacuation routing. When a survey team in Zeytinburnu pulled two sets of images labelled as the same building on Kazlıçeşme Caddesi last spring and found they depicted structures nearly 200 metres apart, the credibility of the entire dataset came into question.

The municipality's IT procurement office confirmed in a published tender document dated March 2026 that it was seeking a vendor to supply AI-assisted deduplication software capable of processing at least 1.2 million georeferenced images stored across its legacy systems. The contract ceiling listed in that tender was 18.4 million Turkish lira — roughly 490,000 US dollars at mid-June exchange rates. Bids closed on June 20, and the award has not yet been publicly announced.

Separately, TMMOB — the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, whose Istanbul branch office sits on Selamiçeşme Caddesi in Kadıköy — has been lobbying for a citywide image governance framework since late 2024. The organisation argues that without binding standards for file naming, GPS tagging and version control, any deduplication exercise will simply defer the problem rather than solve it.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices now sit in front of municipal decision-makers. First, the procurement award: whichever vendor wins the March tender will effectively set the technical standard for the city's entire image infrastructure, a lock-in effect that could last a decade. Planners in districts including Şişli and Beyoğlu, which run their own sub-municipal digitisation budgets, are watching the outcome before committing their own archival formats.

Second, the governance question. The municipality must decide whether to centralise image management under a single directorate or allow the current fragmented structure to continue with only light coordination. Centralisation would resolve the duplication problem faster but requires political agreement between departments that have, according to the tender's own supporting documentation, been operating in silos.

Third, the role of civil society. The Istanbul branch of UNESCO's documentation programme — whose local coordination office is based near the Süleymaniye Mosque complex in Fatih — has offered technical assistance and international archiving standards free of charge, conditional on open-access provisions for the resulting database. The municipality has not yet responded formally to that offer, which was submitted in writing in April 2026.

The deduplication contract award is expected before the end of July. If the municipality also accepts UNESCO's framework conditions, work on a unified archive could begin by September, ahead of the autumn construction season when earthquake-resilience inspections in districts like Avcılar and Bağcılar traditionally peak. If those two decisions diverge — proprietary vendor, closed archive — Istanbul risks repeating in digital form exactly the fragmentation it is trying to photograph its way out of.