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

Istanbul's municipal digital archive is sitting on a problem that has been years in the making. Across servers maintained by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality—known by its Turkish acronym IBB—thousands of duplicate and mislabelled images of the city's historic fabric have accumulated without a systematic review process, creating both a storage headache and a genuine risk that authentic, irreplaceable documentation of neighbourhoods like Balat, Fener, and Süleymaniye will be lost when automated deletion tools run without proper human oversight.

The issue surfaced publicly this spring when IBB's digital services directorate began a broader data-rationalisation drive across its platforms. The archive in question holds visual records stretching back to early digitisation efforts in the early 2000s, covering everything from Bosphorus shoreline surveys to earthquake-vulnerability assessments of older residential stock in Fatih and Zeytinburnu—districts sitting directly atop fault lines identified after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes. When planners need to compare a building's current structural state against a photograph from 2004, having the wrong image tagged to the wrong address is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It can mean the difference between a renovation permit and a demolition order.

What the Duplicate Problem Actually Means on the Ground

Duplicate image replacement sounds like an IT maintenance task. In Istanbul's context, it carries far heavier stakes. The Atatürk Library on Taksim Square holds physical photographic collections that partially overlap with the IBB digital holdings, and archivists there have long flagged the risk of digital copies degrading metadata over successive file migrations. Each time an image is copied, renamed, and re-uploaded without a controlled workflow, the original geotag, photographer credit, and capture date can be overwritten. A photograph of a han—a historic caravanserai—in the Grand Bazaar district tagged incorrectly as a location in Kadıköy becomes useless for planning purposes and potentially misleading for heritage assessments submitted to UNESCO, which has repeatedly scrutinised the city's management of its World Heritage buffer zones along the historic peninsula.

The timing is not incidental. IBB launched its Smart Istanbul 2025–2030 strategy in late 2024, which allocated budget toward digitising municipal services and consolidating data infrastructure. That strategy document, publicly available on the IBB website, references a target of processing more than 2 million civic data files by the end of 2026. Images form the largest single category of those files. With roughly six months left in that calendar year, decisions about which images get kept, which get replaced, and which simply get deleted are being compressed into a tight operational window.

The Decisions Ahead—and Who Makes Them

Three choices will define what happens next. First, IBB must decide whether to bring in external archival expertise or rely entirely on in-house IT staff for the deduplication process. Institutions like SALT Galata—the research centre and archive on Bankalar Caddesi in Karaköy—have built credible digital preservation protocols over the past decade and represent a possible collaboration partner, though no formal agreement has been announced. Second, the municipality must set clear criteria for what constitutes a true duplicate versus a distinct image captured seconds apart that may show different structural details of the same building. That distinction matters enormously for earthquake-risk documentation. Third, and most consequentially, IBB needs to establish a public-access policy for the rationalised archive. Currently, researchers and journalists face inconsistent responses when requesting image files, with some requests fulfilled within days and others unresolved for months.

The Fatih district office and the Beyoğlu municipality have both been involved in parallel digitisation efforts for neighbourhood-level planning records, meaning any central deduplication decision at IBB level will have downstream effects on local planning databases that may not be immediately visible. Coordination between those three administrative layers—central metropolitan, district, and neighbourhood—has historically been uneven, particularly in periods of political tension between IBB leadership and the national government in Ankara.

For researchers, heritage advocates, and residents whose homes appear in these archives, the practical advice is straightforward: request copies of any image records relevant to your property or research area now, before the deduplication sweep completes. Once an image is deleted in a rationalisation process, recovery depends entirely on whether backup protocols were followed—and in Istanbul's municipal IT history, that has not always been guaranteed.