How Istanbul's Historic Districts Became Ground Zero for a Battle Over Copied Images

Istanbul's property and tourism sectors are confronting a problem years in the making: tens of thousands of duplicate and recycled images circulating across listing platforms, municipal heritage portals, and short-term rental sites, creating a distorted picture of neighbourhoods from Beyoğlu to Kadıköy that misleads buyers, renters, and visitors alike. The issue came to a head this spring when the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's digital services directorate flagged the scale of the problem in an internal review, prompting platform operators to begin a coordinated removal process that is still underway.

The timing matters. Istanbul's property market has spent the past three years absorbing extraordinary pressure — earthquake-retrofitting campaigns triggered by the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş disaster pushed hundreds of thousands of lira in renovation costs onto landlords, many of whom rushed to relist upgraded flats using whatever imagery was already in circulation rather than commissioning new photography. At the same time, the lira's sustained weakness against the euro and dollar made Istanbul an increasingly attractive destination for foreign buyers, who rely almost entirely on digital images when making initial assessments from abroad. Bad or duplicated imagery in that context is not a cosmetic inconvenience — it is a commercial liability.

How the Duplication Problem Took Root

The pattern stretches back to the post-2015 Airbnb surge in Sultanahmet and the Galata district. When short-term rental listings multiplied rapidly along İstiklal Caddesi and through the backstreets of Cihangir, many hosts copied stock images or reused photographs from neighbouring properties rather than invest in professional shoots. Sahibinden.com, Turkey's dominant property portal, and Hepsiemlak both saw image libraries balloon without sufficient deduplication checks in place. By 2022, independent digital audits cited by Turkish tech media suggested that a significant proportion of active listings on major Turkish platforms carried images appearing on at least one other active listing — a recycling rate that industry observers described as among the highest in the region.

The problem compounded when real estate offices along Bağdat Caddesi on the Asian side and in Levent's high-rise corridor began bulk-uploading hundreds of listings simultaneously, often drawing on shared internal image banks rather than property-specific shoots. Heritage conservation added another layer of complexity: buildings in the Fatih and Balat districts listed under Istanbul's UNESCO-adjacent protection frameworks are photographed constantly by researchers, NGOs, and city planners, and those images frequently migrated — without authorisation — into commercial listings.

What Platforms and the Municipality Are Now Doing

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality launched its Digital Heritage Image Registry in March 2026, a database intended to catalogue authorised photographs of protected structures across the city's historic peninsula. The registry, developed in partnership with Istanbul Technical University's urban informatics department, uses hash-matching algorithms to flag images that appear across multiple platforms without cleared usage rights. As of late June 2026, the registry had processed more than 340,000 images, according to documentation published on the municipality's open-data portal.

Property platforms are under pressure to comply. Hepsiemlak announced in May 2026 that it would require verified, geo-tagged photography for all new listings in 39 designated Istanbul districts by the end of the third quarter. Sahibinden.com has introduced a manual review queue for listings flagged by its automated duplicate-detection system, though the backlog — by the company's own published figures — stood at over 18,000 listings as of mid-June.

For landlords and agents still navigating the transition, the practical advice is straightforward: listings on Sahibinden, Hepsiemlak, or the municipality's own Bimtas housing platform that carry duplicate-flagged imagery will be deprioritised in search results beginning September 1, 2026, under the new compliance framework. Property photographers operating out of studios in Şişli and Ataşehir have reported a sharp uptick in bookings since the announcements, with session prices for a standard two-bedroom flat running between 1,200 and 2,500 lira depending on location and turnaround time. Owners of listed heritage properties in Balat and Fener face an additional step: image clearance requests must be filed through the Digital Heritage registry before any commercial use, a process the municipality says takes between five and ten working days.