Istanbul's Duplicate Image Crisis: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Digital Heritage Archive

Istanbul's sprawling municipal image archive contains an estimated 340,000 photographs — and according to internal assessments circulating within the İBB, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, a significant portion of that catalogue is made up of duplicate or near-duplicate files that are degrading the usability of the city's digital heritage records. The problem has reached a tipping point, and the decisions taken in the coming months will determine whether the archive becomes a genuine public resource or remains a bloated, difficult-to-search database.

The timing is not accidental. Over the past three years, Istanbul has accelerated its push to digitise visual documentation of historic neighbourhoods — particularly in Balat, Süleymaniye and the Fatih district — as part of a broader effort to catalogue vulnerable built heritage ahead of anticipated seismic retrofitting work following the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes. That acceleration produced volume, but not always discipline. Photographers, contractors and municipal teams frequently uploaded multiple versions of the same frame without any systematic deduplication protocol in place.

What the Review Process Actually Involves

The İBB's Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums, which manages the archive in coordination with the Istanbul Archaeological Museums on Osman Hamdi Bey Yokuşu in Sultanahmet, is now evaluating two competing approaches. The first is an automated AI-assisted deduplication sweep — a technology several European municipal archives, including those in Amsterdam and Vienna, have adopted since 2023. The second is a hybrid model that pairs algorithmic flagging with human curatorial review, preserving editorial judgment over images that are technically similar but contextually distinct, such as photographs of the same Bosphorus waterfront location taken across different seasons or light conditions.

The choice carries real budget implications. An automated-only sweep could cost the municipality as little as 1.2 million Turkish lira for software licensing and implementation, but risks discarding images that have documentary value. A hybrid approach, using contracted archivists working alongside the Tarihi Yarımada Koruma ve Geliştirme Derneği, which has been involved in heritage documentation in the Historic Peninsula since 2018, would likely run to 4.5 million lira or more and take at least 14 months to complete.

Complicating matters further is the question of who holds the final authority. Under Istanbul's current governance structure, CHP mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration controls the İBB's operational decisions, but several of the original digitisation contracts were awarded under previous municipal administrations, leaving copyright and attribution records in a patchwork state. Lawyers advising the municipality have reportedly flagged that replacing or deleting duplicate images without clear rights mapping could expose the city to disputes — a wrinkle that has slowed the process considerably.

The Replacement Pipeline and What Comes After

Assuming a framework is approved before the end of the third quarter of 2026, the practical work of commissioning replacement images would begin in early 2027. Priority neighbourhoods identified in internal planning documents include the Golden Horn waterfront between Fener and Balat, the rooftops above the Kapalıçarşı, and the rapidly changing streetscape of Fikirtepe in Kadıköy, where large-scale urban renewal has already erased visual references that existed as recently as 2021.

The Istanbul Photography Foundation, based in Beyoğlu, has indicated it is prepared to partner with the municipality on a structured commissioning program, potentially funding a portion of the replacement shoot through its existing grant relationships with European cultural organisations. Any such partnership would need to clear procurement rules that apply to İBB contracts — a process that, under current regulations, takes a minimum of 90 days.

The real test will be governance, not technology. Whether the archive ends up more useful depends less on which deduplication software wins the tender and more on whether the municipality establishes a standing curatorial committee with the authority to enforce upload standards going forward. Without that, the duplicate problem will simply rebuild itself, frame by frame, the next time a major documentation drive begins.