Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Istanbul's municipal and heritage agencies are confronting a growing data management problem that administrators say is quietly undermining urban planning, tourism promotion and earthquake preparedness work: thousands of duplicate digital images clogging the city's official archives and public-facing platforms. The issue surfaced formally this spring when Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's digital infrastructure directorate began an internal audit of its GIS-linked image databases.

The timing matters. Turkey's urban planning systems have been under intense scrutiny since the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, which killed more than 50,000 people nationally and forced a hard look at how municipalities document buildings, street conditions and structural risk. Istanbul, sitting astride the North Anatolian Fault, has accelerated its digital mapping efforts. Duplicate or misclassified imagery inside those systems, administrators argue, is not a trivial housekeeping question.

What the Institutions Are Saying

Officials at Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Urban Planning and Urbanization Directorate, based on the European side near Mecidiyeköy, have described the archive backlog in internal communications reviewed by The Daily Istanbul as a consequence of layered digitisation campaigns running since at least 2018. Three separate scanning programmes — covering the Fatih district's Ottoman-era cadastral records, the Bosphorus shoreline development surveys and neighbourhood-level earthquake risk assessments — uploaded imagery into overlapping systems without a unified deduplication protocol.

The Istanbul Branch of the Chamber of City Planners, TMMOB Şehir Plancıları Odası İstanbul Şubesi, has raised the issue in its quarterly bulletin, pointing to inconsistencies in how heritage-listed structures in Balat and Fener appear across different public databases. The chamber has not yet issued a formal report with figures, but its working group on digital urbanism met in June to discuss standardisation frameworks, according to the organisation's published agenda for its Karaköy office meetings.

Preservationists at the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, IKSV, and at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which has been active in restoring structures in Sulukule and the Golden Horn waterfront corridor, have separately flagged that promotional and archival image duplication causes practical problems: grant applications and UNESCO-adjacent heritage filings sometimes carry conflicting photographic evidence of the same building's condition at the same date.

The Technical Dimension

Digital asset experts consulted independently by this newspaper — without attribution to named individuals, as they were not authorised to speak on behalf of their employers — describe the core problem as institutional rather than technical. The tools to identify and remove duplicate images have existed for years. What Istanbul's agencies lack, these experts say, is a cross-directorate governance structure that assigns clear ownership of the master image repository.

Comparable cities have addressed this. Ankara's Metropolitan Municipality launched a unified geospatial data platform in 2024 under its Smart City Action Plan, consolidating imagery from at least four previously separate directorates. Barcelona's urban data office, citing its 2022 City Data Strategy, reduced duplicated records in its public heritage image bank by reportedly more than 40 percent within 18 months of implementing a shared metadata standard. Istanbul has no equivalent published benchmark yet.

The scale here is significant. Istanbul's municipality manages assets across 39 districts, a coastline stretching roughly 600 kilometres including the Bosphorus and both sea shores, and a built heritage inventory covering thousands of registered structures from Topkapı Palace to the Theodosian Walls in Yedikule. Even a modest duplication rate across such a corpus represents tens of thousands of redundant files.

For residents and businesses, the downstream effects range from bureaucratic delay — property owners in Beşiktaş and Üsküdar have reported conflicting aerial imagery complicating renovation permit applications — to longer-term concerns about whether Istanbul's seismic vulnerability data is as current and clean as it needs to be ahead of the next major earthquake.

The Metropolitan Municipality's digital directorate is expected to present a deduplication roadmap to the city council before the end of the third quarter of 2026. Planners and heritage advocates say the test will be whether that roadmap comes with a cross-agency mandate and a budget line, or remains a technical aspiration sitting inside a single directorate's filing cabinet.