Istanbul's Urban Archives Face a Reckoning Over Duplicate Images: Key Decisions Ahead

Istanbul's municipal archives hold an estimated 1.2 million digitised photographs spanning more than a century of the city's life, from the last decades of the Ottoman Empire through the construction booms of the 1980s and the Bosphorus bridge controversies of more recent decades. A months-long internal review by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums has identified tens of thousands of duplicate image files — in some cases the same photograph catalogued under three or four separate entries, with conflicting dates, neighbourhood labels and photographer credits. The directorate is now facing a set of consequential choices about how to clean the archive, and the decisions carry weight far beyond database hygiene.

The timing matters. Turkey's broader political environment — with the AKP government and the CHP-led metropolitan municipality frequently at odds over resource allocation and cultural policy — has made every decision about Istanbul's public memory assets politically charged. Heritage professionals point to the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes as a turning point: the disaster forced archivists across the country to confront how poorly catalogued and duplicated digital records are when institutions need to act quickly. Istanbul, sitting on the North Anatolian Fault line, cannot afford the same chaos in an emergency. Getting the image archive in order is, in that context, an infrastructure problem, not merely an aesthetic one.

What the Clean-Up Actually Involves

The Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums, headquartered near Saraçhane in Fatih district, has been working since early 2026 with the Istanbul Photography and Cinema Museum — known by its Turkish acronym İFSAK — to develop a deduplication protocol. The core challenge is not purely technical. Many duplicates exist because different departments — the Istanbul History Foundation (İSTV), district municipalities in Beyoğlu and Kadıköy, and the national archives branch on Bâb-ı Âli Caddesi — each digitised the same physical prints independently, sometimes decades apart, and uploaded them to separate systems with incompatible metadata standards. A photograph of the Galata Bridge taken in 1953, for instance, may exist in the system under four different file names, two different dates, and captions that place it variously in Eminönü and Karaköy.

Automated deduplication software can flag near-identical image files, but archivists stress that algorithmic matching alone carries significant risk. Photographs that appear visually identical may have been taken seconds apart and document subtly different moments. Deleting the wrong file could permanently erase a unique historical record. The directorate's internal working group has proposed a three-tier human review process — flagging, specialist assessment, and final sign-off — before any file is permanently removed. That process, applied to an estimated 40,000 flagged duplicates, would require roughly 18 months of dedicated staff time at current resourcing levels, according to the directorate's preliminary planning documents.

The Decisions That Cannot Be Delayed

Three questions now sit on the desks of municipal officials. First, funding: the proposed deduplication project is estimated to cost between 12 million and 18 million Turkish lira, a range that reflects uncertainty about staffing costs in a high-inflation environment. With the lira continuing to lose purchasing power through 2025 and into 2026, any budget agreed today may be insufficient by the time contracts are signed. Second, public access: the municipality must decide whether to release the cleaned archive under an open-licence framework, as heritage advocates in Cihangir and Moda have been pressing for, or to maintain the current restricted access model that requires researchers to apply in writing. Open access would accelerate error-correction through crowdsourcing but raises questions about commercial misuse of images still under copyright. Third, governance: no single institution currently holds clear legal authority over the consolidated archive. Resolving that question — likely through a formal inter-agency protocol between the metropolitan municipality, the Culture Ministry, and district administrations — is a prerequisite for any long-term solution.

Heritage professionals working with the archive say the next six months are critical. The directorate is expected to present a formal proposal to the metropolitan council before the end of September 2026. If funding is approved in the autumn budget cycle, a pilot deduplication exercise covering the Beyoğlu district photograph collection — roughly 8,000 images — could begin as early as January 2027. How that pilot goes will effectively set the template for the rest of Istanbul's visual memory.