Istanbul Archivists Battle Corrupted Image Files Threatening Municipal Photo Heritage

Istanbul's digital archivists hit a breaking point this week. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's documentation unit, operating out of the Atatürk Library on Millet Caddesi in Beyazıt, confirmed it is running an emergency audit after thousands of duplicate and mislabeled image files were discovered embedded across its public-facing heritage portal. The problem, months in the making, finally became impossible to ignore when the portal's search function began returning the same degraded scan in place of dozens of distinct historical photographs.

The timing matters. Turkey's broader push to digitise municipal records accelerated sharply after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, which destroyed physical archives across eleven provinces and demonstrated, in the most brutal possible terms, what happens when analogue originals disappear without a verified digital backup. Istanbul, sitting on the North Anatolian Fault and widely assessed by seismologists to face significant earthquake risk, has been under pressure from both city government and civil society groups to get its own digital house in order before a similar disaster strikes.

What Went Wrong, and Where

The root cause appears to be a batch migration carried out in late 2025, when roughly 340,000 image files were transferred from an older proprietary system to a new open-source repository. During that transfer, a misconfigured deduplication script failed silently, allowing thousands of files to be ingested multiple times under different metadata tags. The result: searches for historical images of, say, Karaköy's waterfront or the covered bazaars of the Grand Bazaar district now surface the same half-dozen files dozens of times, while genuinely unique photographs are buried or, in some cases, overwritten entirely.

The Istanbul branch of TÜRKAY, the Turkish Archivists and Documentarians Association, flagged the issue publicly on July 1, publishing a technical summary on its website. The group noted that at least 12,000 image records currently tagged as unique in the municipal portal are suspected duplicates. That figure does not include images held by separate institutions such as the Istanbul Archaeological Museums in Sultanahmet, which runs its own independent digital catalogue and says it has not been affected by the municipal migration.

Libraries and Cultural Groups Mobilise

Beyoğlu's SALT Galata research centre moved quickly. Staff there began cross-referencing their own 180,000-item image database against the municipal portal on Wednesday, looking for cases where a corrupted or duplicate municipal file might be the only surviving digital copy of a shared original. SALT Galata, which holds extensive photographic collections documenting Ottoman-era Istanbul, has offered to supply replacement scans for verified losses, a process its team expects to take several weeks.

Meanwhile, the Atatürk Library suspended public uploads to its crowdsourced tagging programme, a scheme that had allowed volunteers to add neighbourhood and date metadata to historical photographs, while the audit continues. The suspension affects roughly 400 registered volunteer contributors who had been actively working through a backlog of unlabelled images from the 1950s and 1960s.

For researchers and journalists who rely on the portal, the practical disruption is already tangible. Image licensing requests, which the library typically processes within five business days for a standard fee of 350 Turkish lira per image for editorial use, are now facing open-ended delays as staff cannot confirm which files in the system are authoritative originals.

The municipality has not issued a formal public statement, but TÜRKAY's July 1 technical note says the institution is expected to present a remediation timeline by July 14. Archivists familiar with similar migrations in other European cities, Madrid's municipal archive faced a comparable deduplication failure in 2021, suggest a realistic clean-up for a collection of this size takes between three and six months, depending on how many files require manual review. Anyone currently relying on the Istanbul municipal portal for historical image research should cross-check findings against SALT Galata's independently maintained database or the physical collections held at the Beyazıt State Library on Beyazıt Square before publication or citation.