Istanbul's Landmark Archives Face a Reckoning Over Duplicate Images: What Happens Next

Istanbul's cultural institutions are sitting on a problem that has quietly grown for years: tens of thousands of duplicate and mislabelled images lodged inside the digital archives that were meant to protect the city's visual history. The immediate question is no longer whether to act, but who acts first and what the cleanup will cost.

The issue surfaced publicly this spring when the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Directorate of Cultural Heritage flagged inconsistencies during a routine migration of photograph collections from legacy databases to a unified cloud platform. Duplicate image replacement—the technical process of identifying, removing, and re-cataloguing redundant files while preserving the originals—sounds bureaucratic. In a city where a single Ottoman-era glass-plate negative from Sultanahmet can carry authentication value and academic citation chains, getting it wrong has real consequences.

What the Audit Revealed and Why Timing Matters

The audit covered collections held across at least three major repositories: the Istanbul Research Institute on İstiklal Caddesi, the Atatürk Library in Taksim, and the digital wing of the Istanbul Archaeological Museums in Sultanahmet. Together they hold hundreds of thousands of digitised items, some scanned as far back as the early 2000s under underfunded pilot programs that used inconsistent file-naming protocols. When those early batches were absorbed into newer systems, duplicates multiplied.

The timing matters because the municipality's five-year digital heritage strategy, launched in 2023 following the Kahramanmaraş earthquake disaster, tied emergency documentation of at-risk structures directly to these same archive systems. If duplicate records are contaminating the baseline, structural engineers and urban planners using archive imagery to assess pre-earthquake building states could be working from unreliable data. That is not an abstract risk in a city where an estimated 80,000 buildings are classified as structurally vulnerable under the Istanbul Earthquake Risk Mitigation Plan.

Beyond earthquake preparedness, tourism revenue is implicated. Istanbul welcomed more than 20 million international visitors in 2024, and heritage image licensing—sold through the municipality and private agencies—has become a growing revenue line. Duplicate records inflate apparent collection size and create licensing disputes when the same image appears under two different catalogue numbers with conflicting attribution dates.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices now sit on the desks of municipal officials and archive directors. First: whether to pursue a manual review, which preserves human judgment but would take an estimated two to three years given current staffing levels at the Atatürk Library's digitisation unit. Second: whether to commission AI-assisted deduplication software, a faster option that several European city archives including Vienna's Wienbibliothek have already deployed, but one that requires procurement tendering under Turkish public contract law—a process that itself typically runs six to nine months. Third: a hybrid model in which automated tools flag candidates and trained archivists make final calls.

The Istanbul Research Institute, a private foundation on İstiklal Caddesi, has signalled it is prepared to move independently of the municipality on its own holdings, which number around 40,000 digitised images. That could create a split standard: one methodology for the foundation's collection, another for publicly held archives, complicating any future unified search platform.

Money is the other variable. Municipal cultural spending has been squeezed by inflation—the Turkish lira lost significant purchasing power through 2024 and into 2025, pushing the cost of imported software licences sharply higher. Earmarking a dedicated budget line for archive remediation will require a supplementary council vote, and with the İBB council divided between CHP and AKP blocs, procedural delays are realistic.

What happens in the next 90 days will set the trajectory. Archive directors are expected to present a joint recommendation to the municipality's Culture and Social Affairs Committee before the end of September 2026. If they align on the hybrid model and the committee approves it, procurement could begin before the year is out. If they disagree, the problem stays live inside systems that are already struggling to carry it. For a city that markets its layered history to the world every single day, letting the question drift is the one option that costs the most.