How Istanbul's Street Signs Ended Up With the Same Photo Twice: The Story Behind the City's Image Duplication Problem

Walk along the waterfront at Karaköy, past the ferry terminals and the salt-bleached bollards, and you will find something that should not be there: two identical photographs of the Golden Horn, mounted side by side on the same heritage interpretation panel, one where an image of the Spice Bazaar's interior ought to be. The same duplication appears on at least three panels along the Sultanahmet tourist circuit and on a cluster of information boards near the Galata Tower. Nobody officially announced it. Nobody issued a correction. The panels simply stayed wrong.

The duplication problem is small in the absolute sense — a visual nuisance rather than a public safety failure — but it sits at the intersection of several larger pressures bearing down on Istanbul's municipal administration right now. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, known by its Turkish initials IBB, has spent the past three years trying to digitise and centralise its public communications assets after decades of piecemeal outsourcing left the city with no single authoritative image archive. The duplicate photographs are, in that context, a symptom rather than a cause.

A Fragmented Archive, Years in the Making

The problem traces back at least to 2019, when the IBB under Mayor Ekrem Imamoğlu began auditing the contracts inherited from the previous administration. What the audit reportedly found — and what has been discussed in municipal planning circles since — was a city whose visual identity had been built across dozens of separate vendor arrangements, each holding its own folder of images, each tagging and categorising photographs differently, with no shared metadata standard. When panels were refreshed or reprinted, contractors drew from whichever local archive they had access to, without cross-checking against the wider municipal stock.

Istanbul's heritage interpretation infrastructure is substantial. The city operates more than 400 public information panels across districts including Fatih, Beyoğlu, Üsküdar and Beşiktaş, according to figures the IBB has cited in previous budget discussions. Many of those panels date to a major tourism infrastructure push between 2010 and 2014, when Istanbul held the European Capital of Culture designation and then hosted a surge of visitors drawn by that profile. The panels were designed to last a decade. They have now lasted nearly fifteen years, and the digital workflows that were supposed to keep their content current have not kept pace.

The specific duplication that is now visible in Sultanahmet appears to have been introduced during a reprinting cycle in late 2024, when a contractor working on panel restoration used a shared drive that had been incorrectly populated. The same image file — a wide-angle shot of the Golden Horn taken from Eyüpsultan — was assigned to two separate content slots because the original source file for one of those slots had been lost during a server migration the IBB carried out in mid-2023. The server migration was itself connected to a broader IT consolidation project that the municipality began after the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes prompted every major Turkish city to review its digital infrastructure resilience.

What the IBB Is Doing Now

The IBB's cultural assets directorate has been working since early 2025 on a centralised digital asset management system, contracted through a procurement process that closed in February of that year. The system, intended to give all approved vendors a single, version-controlled image library with locked metadata, was projected to go live in the fourth quarter of 2025. It has not yet fully launched. Staff familiar with the project have described integration difficulties with the municipality's legacy databases, though no official timeline revision has been published.

In practical terms, visitors to the Sultanahmet district or the Karaköy waterfront who notice the repeated images are looking at panels that will be corrected only when the new asset management system is operational and a fresh reprinting cycle is authorised. The IBB has not published a public schedule for that work. For anyone with a professional or academic interest in Istanbul's public heritage infrastructure — researchers at institutions such as Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi or Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, which both run urban studies programmes — the duplication offers a concrete case study in what happens when digital governance lags behind physical maintenance. The city's panels will eventually be fixed. The underlying workflow problem is what the municipality still has to solve.