How Istanbul's Historic Image Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicates — and Why It Took Decades to Fix

Istanbul's municipal image archives hold somewhere in the region of 1.4 million photographs documenting the city's built environment, from the Ottoman-era hans of the Grand Bazaar district to the reinforced-concrete apartment blocks thrown up across Bağcılar in the 1990s construction boom. A significant share of those files — by internal estimates discussed at a February 2026 working group convened by Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's urban planning directorate — are duplicates: identical or near-identical images stored under different file names, different dates, sometimes different neighbourhoods entirely.

The problem did not emerge overnight. It is the product of three overlapping institutional failures that accumulated across roughly 25 years, and understanding how they compounded one another matters now because the municipality is preparing a major infrastructure tender for a unified digital asset management system, with a procurement deadline set for September 2026.

Three Failures, One Very Large Mess

The first failure was analogue. Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Istanbul's city planning and heritage bodies — including the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Directorate of Cultural Heritage and the separately administered Istanbul Archaeological Museums — ran parallel photographic collections with no shared cataloguing standard. Field photographers working in Fatih documented the same Byzantine church walls that colleagues photographed for Eminönü district records, with no mechanism to flag overlap. Physical prints were filed by district, not by subject or GPS coordinate, because GPS-tagged photography was not yet standard practice.

The second failure was the digitisation scramble that followed the 2004 municipal restructuring, when Erdoğan-era administrative reforms merged dozens of former district municipalities under a single metropolitan umbrella. Digitisation was handed to individual departments with separate budgets, separate software licences, and — critically — no interoperability requirement. The Fatih Municipality archive was scanned to JPEG at 72 dpi. The Beyoğlu directorate used TIFF at 300 dpi. Neither used consistent metadata schemas. When files were later consolidated onto shared servers, the system had no automated deduplication layer, and staff lacked both the training and the time to review files manually.

The third failure was economic. Turkish lira depreciation after 2018 made software licences priced in euros or dollars prohibitively expensive to renew. The municipality's IT procurement records — publicly accessible through the Electronic Public Procurement Platform, known as EKAP — show a pattern of deferred renewals on archive management contracts through 2019 and 2021. Departments reverted to saving files locally, on departmental drives, and uploading batches to central servers without version control. Duplicate counts grew.

Why 2023 Made Everything Worse

The February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes accelerated an already chaotic process. Istanbul's urban planning teams were pulled into emergency seismic-risk assessment work across vulnerable districts including Avcılar, Zeytinburnu, and Küçükçekmece. Photographic documentation of at-risk buildings was generated at an unprecedented rate — engineers, municipal inspectors, and contracted survey firms all photographing the same structures — and uploaded to central repositories with minimal coordination. By late 2023, the Zeytinburnu district files alone reportedly contained multiple sets of images of individual apartment blocks taken within days of one another.

FOTOĞRAF-İST, a professional association of Istanbul-based documentary photographers that has campaigned for standardised archiving practices since 2017, has submitted formal recommendations to the municipality's information technology committee on two occasions — in March 2024 and again in January 2026 — calling for a city-wide metadata protocol based on the Dublin Core standard and mandatory deduplication checks at the point of upload.

The September 2026 procurement process will be the first real test of whether those recommendations found traction. The tender specification, circulated in draft form to stakeholders in May 2026, includes a requirement for automated duplicate detection using perceptual hashing — a technique that flags visually similar images even when file names differ. That is a meaningful technical step. The harder challenge will be legacy data: the millions of already-filed images that no automated tool can reliably sort without human review.

Organisations and institutions holding parallel archives — including the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's own Atatürk Library on Millet Caddesi in Fatih, which holds substantial photographic collections — will need to decide whether to integrate into a unified system or maintain independent catalogues. The municipality has set an internal coordination deadline of December 2026 for participating institutions to submit integration roadmaps. Missing that deadline is, based on the last two decades, entirely plausible.