Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Visual Future

Istanbul's municipal digital archives contain thousands of duplicate and outdated photographs — images that misrepresent the city's rapidly changing skyline, heritage zones, and neighbourhoods — and the decisions made in the coming months about how to clean up that record will have lasting consequences for urban planning, tourism marketing, and public information.

The problem matters now because Istanbul is mid-way through a major digital infrastructure push tied to the İBB Smart City Strategy, a programme run out of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's technology directorate. Duplicate images embedded in official databases distort everything from earthquake-risk assessments of older buildings in Fatih to tourist maps of the Galata district. With the municipality preparing to roll out an updated geographic information system before the end of 2026, getting the image layer right is not a bureaucratic footnote — it is a core technical requirement.

Where the Problem Shows Up on the Ground

Walk through the Kapalıçarşı — the Grand Bazaar — and you will find promotional material inside the complex's management office that still uses photographs taken before the 2021 interior restoration. In Beşiktaş, the municipality's online property records include street-level images of buildings that were demolished as part of the urban transformation programme in 2023 and 2024. Neither set of images is flagged as outdated. Both remain in active circulation inside official systems.

The Atatürk Cultural Centre on Taksim Square — reopened in October 2021 after a decade of closure and complete reconstruction — is still represented by pre-demolition photographs in at least two third-party platforms that licence image data from municipal feeds. The duplication cascades: one outdated master image spawns dozens of copies across subsystems. Istanbul's urban planners refer informally to this as the "ghost layer" problem, where a building or streetscape that no longer exists continues to appear in datasets used for active decisions.

The İBB's geographic information subsidiary, Bimtaş, is understood to be the lead technical body on the deduplication effort, though the municipality has not yet published a formal timeline or budget for the project. Bimtaş manages spatial data for a city of roughly 16 million registered residents and has handled major infrastructure mapping contracts including the Marmaray tunnel corridor and the new Galataport cruise terminal zone, which opened in stages from 2021 onwards.

The Decisions Ahead

Three choices will define what happens next. The first is whether the municipality opts for an automated deduplication algorithm — faster but prone to errors in a city where two photographs of the same Bosphorus-facing façade taken six months apart can represent dramatically different legal realities — or a manually supervised review process. The second is who controls the master archive. Currently, image data sits across at least four separate İBB departments, including the Cultural Heritage Directorate, the Urban Planning Directorate, and the Tourism and International Relations office. Consolidating that into a single authoritative repository requires both a political decision and a procurement process.

The third and most consequential decision concerns licensing. Istanbul's image archive, if cleaned and consolidated, would represent a commercially valuable dataset. The municipality could licence it to mapping platforms, travel companies, and architectural firms — generating revenue that could offset digitisation costs estimated by similar projects in European cities at between €2 million and €5 million for a metropolitan-scale archive. Alternatively, it could make the archive freely available under an open-data framework, a model that aligns with İBB's stated open-government commitments but one that requires sustained public funding to maintain.

The pressure to act is real. Istanbul's earthquake preparedness plans — updated following the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş disaster — depend heavily on accurate building-condition imagery, particularly in at-risk districts like Avcılar and Zeytinburnu. A ghost-layer image of a since-reinforced or since-demolished structure fed into a risk model produces a wrong answer. City planners working on the Zeytinburnu coastal road project have reportedly flagged image data inconsistencies to the İBB technology directorate more than once in the past year. The municipality has not yet responded publicly to those concerns. A formal decision on the deduplication framework is expected before Istanbul's budget cycle closes in October 2026.