Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Rome, Barcelona and Dubai

Turkey's cultural institutions are sitting on a quiet crisis. Across Istanbul's public-facing platforms — from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's tourism portals to the digital archives maintained by the Atatürk Library in Beyoğlu — duplicate and misattributed images have proliferated at a rate that conservators and archivists say is outpacing the city's ability to manage them. The problem is not unique to Istanbul, but the city's particular mix of Byzantine, Ottoman and modern visual heritage makes the stakes considerably higher than in most European or Gulf counterparts.

The issue has gained urgency in 2026 as AI image-generation tools have flooded travel and news platforms with synthetic photographs that are frequently misidentified as authentic historical documentation. Cities that manage major UNESCO World Heritage sites — Istanbul has three such zones, including the Historic Areas of Istanbul designated in 1985 — face the added risk of fake or duplicated visuals entering academic and legal records, complicating everything from restoration grant applications to court cases over property rights in places like Sultanahmet and Zeyrek.

Where Istanbul Lags Behind Rome and Barcelona

Rome and Barcelona have both invested heavily in centralised image-rights registries. Barcelona's municipal government, through its Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, began requiring digital watermarking and unique identifier tagging on all officially licensed city images in January 2025. Rome's Sovrintendenza Capitolina launched a comparable system tied to its MIC (Ministero della Cultura) database in mid-2024. Both cities now run automated duplicate-detection scans across their official platforms at least monthly, according to publicly available procurement documents from each institution.

Istanbul has no equivalent centralised system. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's digital communications directorate operates its image library largely through contracted agencies, and there is no publicly documented protocol for cross-platform duplicate checking. The Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, known as TGA, maintains a separate bank of destination imagery — but the two systems do not communicate with each other in any structured way, according to the TGA's own published operational framework from 2024.

Dubai, which administers its destination imagery through the Dubai Tourism and Commerce Marketing authority, introduced an AI-assisted deduplication layer to its licensed image platform in October 2024 as part of a broader AED 120 million digital infrastructure overhaul. The contrast with Istanbul's fragmented approach is stark, even accounting for the difference in governance structures between a Gulf emirate and a Turkish metropolitan municipality operating under the political friction between the CHP-led city government and the AKP national administration.

What the Fragmentation Costs in Practice

The practical damage shows up in places visitors actually see. Several prominent travel platforms have in recent years circulated photographs labelled as the Galata Tower that were in fact images of the Beyazıt Tower, roughly four kilometres away in the Beyazıt district — a confusion that persists partly because no central authority is flagging the mislabelling. The Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, Turkey's land registry and cadastral directorate, has separately flagged problems with duplicated or AI-altered property images appearing in disputed real-estate filings, a concern that carries particular weight given ongoing redevelopment controversies along the Bosphorus waterfront.

The Atatürk Library, which holds one of the largest collections of historical Istanbul photographs in existence — including tens of thousands of negatives from the late Ottoman period — completed a partial digitisation push in 2023, but as of the library's last published annual report, fewer than 30 percent of those digitised assets had been assigned internationally recognised persistent identifiers that would allow automated deduplication tools to flag copies elsewhere on the internet.

Closing that gap will require either a dedicated budget line from the Metropolitan Municipality or a coordinated mandate from the national Culture Ministry — two institutions that have not been notable for joint initiatives in recent years. Archivists and digital preservation professionals working with Istanbul's collections say the most realistic near-term path runs through international grant programmes, including those administered by the European Commission's Horizon Europe framework, to which Turkish institutions remain eligible as associated partners. Applications for the 2027 cycle open in September 2026. That deadline, at least, is one Istanbul's institutions can still meet.