Istanbul's Duplicate Image Problem: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Istanbul's municipal permit and heritage documentation system contains tens of thousands of duplicate, mislabelled or conflicting images — and a cross-sector push to clean up the archive is now forcing city hall, preservation bodies and tech specialists to agree on who is responsible, and who will pay. The issue has moved from a bureaucratic footnote to a live dispute, with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB), the General Directorate of Foundations, and the Ministry of Culture all holding overlapping visual databases that do not talk to each other.

The stakes are not abstract. With Istanbul sitting on one of the world's most scrutinised UNESCO World Heritage Sites — the Historic Areas of Istanbul, inscribed in 1985 — misfiled or duplicated property images can delay restoration permits by months, slow earthquake-resilience surveys in high-risk districts like Fatih and Zeytinburnu, and create legal grey zones when owners dispute cadastral records. After the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, pressure on Istanbul authorities to accelerate structural surveys of pre-1980 buildings has intensified, making clean visual records a practical safety question, not just an administrative one.

Where the Problem Lives

Two institutions sit at the centre of the dispute. The İBB's Department of Historic Environment and Heritage runs a digital catalogue of roughly 480,000 geo-tagged property images covering the old city peninsula, Balat, Fener and parts of Üsküdar on the Asian shore. Separately, the Ministry of Culture's Regional Directorate for Istanbul maintains its own photographic register, required under the 2863 Law on the Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets. Specialists working in both systems say the same facade can appear under three different cadastral parcel numbers, with photographs taken in different years showing different structures on the same plot — a byproduct of decades of piecemeal digitisation rather than a single coordinated effort.

The Sulukule neighbourhood in Fatih, where urban renewal cleared hundreds of Ottoman-era structures between 2006 and 2010, is frequently cited as a case study. Restoration applicants working on the remaining listed buildings there have reportedly encountered permit delays caused specifically by image duplication errors in the digital file — situations where a photograph of a demolished property was still attached to an active parcel record. The Turkish Chamber of Architects Istanbul branch has raised the issue in public forums at least twice since 2024, arguing the duplication problem undermines both legal certainty and heritage protection.

What Officials and Experts Are Saying

The İBB, under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration, launched a digital infrastructure review in early 2025 that included an audit of the heritage image archive. Municipal officials have described the project in public budget sessions as part of a broader 2025–2027 digital transformation programme, with an allocated envelope of roughly 180 million Turkish lira for data infrastructure across multiple departments. Whether image deduplication is a funded line item within that envelope has not been confirmed in public documents.

Urban data specialists at Istanbul Technical University, which runs one of Turkey's most active geomatics research departments on the Maslak campus, have argued in published academic work that automated hash-based deduplication tools — already standard in commercial real estate platforms — could clear the majority of exact-duplicate image pairs within weeks. The harder problem, they note, is near-duplicate images: photographs of the same building taken at different angles, in different seasons, or after partial demolition, which require human review or machine-learning classifiers trained on Ottoman and early-Republican building typologies.

The General Directorate of Foundations, which administers hundreds of historically significant vakıf properties across Eminönü, Beyazıt and Fatih, has indicated it is in early-stage talks with the İBB about a shared image verification protocol, according to statements made at a heritage management symposium held in Istanbul in March 2026. No formal agreement has been announced.

For property owners, architects and restoration contractors, the practical advice from legal specialists is straightforward: when filing any permit application involving a listed structure, submit fresh, date-stamped photographs taken within 90 days, alongside the cadastral parcel number verified through the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü's online TAKBIS portal. That step alone bypasses the worst of the legacy duplication errors while the city works toward a system-wide fix — one that, by most expert accounts, is still at least two years from completion.