'My History Is Disappearing': Istanbul Residents Speak Out as Duplicate Image Removals Erase Neighbourhood Records

Hundreds of Istanbul residents say they have lost irreplaceable photographic records of their neighbourhoods after an automated duplicate-image detection system deployed across several crowd-sourced mapping and heritage platforms began removing uploaded photos without individual review or appeal. The removals, which accelerated through May and June 2026, have hit hardest in districts already under pressure from rapid redevelopment — Balat, Fener and Tarlabaşı among them.

The timing is not accidental. Istanbul is midway through a contested urban renewal cycle that has placed the visual documentation of older, working-class and minority neighbourhoods at the centre of preservation debates. Heritage campaigners have spent years building photographic archives precisely because physical structures in areas like Tarlabaşı — subject to municipality-backed clearance since the early 2010s — can vanish before any official record is made. When algorithmic systems then remove those images as duplicates, residents say the double loss is devastating.

What the Algorithm Took

The platforms affected include at least two widely used collaborative heritage tools available in Turkish: one operated through a partnership with the Çekül Foundation, which has run community documentation projects along the Golden Horn since 2019, and another linked to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's open-data initiative launched in January 2025. Neither platform had published a public explanation for the removal wave as of Friday morning.

Residents of Balat's Vodina Caddesi described uploading street-level photographs of Byzantine-era building facades over several years, only to find the images flagged and removed after a near-identical frame — often taken by a different person on a different day — was judged by the system to be a functional duplicate. Because the algorithm compares visual similarity rather than metadata, photos shot months or even years apart are being collapsed into a single retained image, with all others deleted.

The problem extends into the Syrian refugee community settled across parts of Fatih and Gaziosmanpaşa. Community members there have used the same platforms to document demolished or altered buildings that formed part of their pre-migration memory, uploading images of Istanbul neighbourhoods that carry personal, not merely architectural, significance. For them, a duplicate flag is not a minor inconvenience — it can erase the only digital trace of a building they photographed once, years ago.

A Gap in Governance

Turkey's existing framework for digital cultural property does not extend clearly to crowd-sourced photographic archives. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism's digitisation mandate, updated in 2023 following the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, focuses on state-held collections rather than citizen-generated content. That leaves platforms largely self-governing on deletion policy.

The Çekül Foundation confirmed it is reviewing its content moderation protocols, according to information posted on its public bulletin board this week, though no timeline for restoring removed images has been given. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality had not responded to a written inquiry from The Daily Istanbul by press time Friday.

Affected residents have begun organising through a Telegram group with more than 340 members as of Thursday evening, coordinating re-uploads and attempting to contact platform administrators directly. Several have filed individual complaints through the municipality's ALO 153 citizen services line, though those complaints are designed for physical urban issues, not digital content disputes, and the outcomes remain unclear.

Anyone who uploaded images to community heritage platforms in Istanbul between 2020 and early 2026 should check their account history now and download local copies of any remaining photos. Archivists at the Tarih Vakfı — the History Foundation of Turkey, headquartered on Barbaros Bulvarı in Balmumcu — have offered to help residents file formal documentation requests and, where possible, to absorb at-risk images into the foundation's own preservation catalogue. The foundation's document submission portal is open on weekdays until 17:00. For residents without digital access, the Fatih district branch of the Istanbul Provincial Directorate of Culture at Adnan Menderes Bulvarı accepts printed photographs for official cataloguing under a programme that has been running since March 2024.