How Istanbul's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of the Same Photo Twice: The Long Road to the Duplicate Image Crisis

Istanbul's municipal image repositories — used by everyone from urban planners at the İBB to journalists filing stories about Beyoğlu — contain an estimated 340,000 duplicate image files, according to internal figures reviewed by The Daily Istanbul this week. The number is not a rounding error. It represents roughly 18 percent of the total digitised visual archive held across three separate Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality platforms, a proportion that archivists say has been quietly growing since at least 2019.

The timing matters because the İBB is now mid-way through a 14-month contract, signed in February 2026 with Ankara-based data firm Arge Dijital, to consolidate those platforms into a single searchable system. Duplicate records are the single biggest technical obstacle, and the bill for cleaning them up has already risen twice since the contract was signed. Arge Dijital's current remediation estimate stands at 4.2 million Turkish lira above the original project budget — a significant overrun against a backdrop of persistent lira volatility.

How the Problem Was Built, Layer by Layer

The roots go back to the early 2000s, when the municipality's communications directorate and its separate urban-planning arm, the İstanbul Planlama Ajansı, began digitising historical photographs independently of one another. Neither department used a common file-naming protocol. By 2011, when a third archive was spun up specifically for Bosphorus coastal-development documentation — a politically sensitive category given the ongoing controversies around waterfront construction — there were already tens of thousands of images sitting in two different systems with no cross-referencing between them.

The 2013 Gezi Park protests accelerated the problem in a way nobody planned for. The communications team at the time ingested thousands of news-agency photographs into the municipal press archive as reference material. Many of those images duplicated frames that İBB photographers had already submitted through a separate upload portal on Kemeraltı Caddesi, where the old press office was based before the directorate moved to its current Saraçhane building. Nobody audited the overlap.

A 2018 attempt to merge the systems under then-mayor Mevlüt Uysal's administration produced a unified front-end interface but left the backend databases technically separate. Staff at the Fatih district office and at the İBB's Taksim-area media centre were essentially accessing two warehouses through one door. When the CHP's Ekrem İmamoğlu took over in June 2019, his team inherited the cosmetic fix without the structural solution.

Why Fixing It Now Is Harder Than It Sounds

Duplicate image replacement — the process of identifying redundant files, selecting a canonical version, rerouting all internal links to that version, and deleting the rest — sounds mechanical. In practice it requires human judgment at every step, particularly for historically significant photographs of places like the Galata Tower restoration, the 2023 earthquake-relief operations, or the contested Kanal Istanbul planning documents. Archivists at the İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü on Kemankeş Caddesi in Karaköy have been consulting informally on the project since March, advising on which image versions carry superior metadata and should be treated as the master record.

The European Union's DIGCOMP framework, which Turkey has used as a loose reference standard since a 2021 memorandum with the Digital Turkey programme, recommends that public institutions complete duplicate audits before any platform migration begins, not during one. Istanbul did it in reverse order.

The consolidation project is scheduled for completion by April 2027. Arge Dijital has proposed a machine-learning deduplication pass followed by manual review of flagged images — a two-stage approach that archivists broadly support but warn will only work if department heads at both the İstanbul Planlama Ajansı and the communications directorate agree on a single metadata taxonomy before the automated pass runs. That agreement has not yet been reached. Staff at both offices have been asked to submit proposals by 1 September 2026. Until then, planners, journalists and researchers who rely on the municipal image system will continue pulling up the same photograph twice — and sometimes making decisions based on whichever version loads first.