How Istanbul's Historic Photo Archive Became a Battlefield Over Duplicate Images

Istanbul's municipal archives hold somewhere north of two million photographic images — daguerreotypes from the late Ottoman period, mid-century black-and-white prints of Galata Bridge before its 1992 replacement, and digital files shot by city contractors since the early 2000s. The problem, now pressing enough that the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's culture directorate has been quietly circulating a remediation proposal since early 2026, is that a substantial portion of those images exist in duplicate — sometimes triplicate — across incompatible systems, with conflicting metadata and no clear chain of custody.

This matters right now because the issue has collided with two separate pressures. First, the municipality under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has been pushing a transparency-and-digitisation agenda that has put legacy data management failures under a sharper light than they received under previous administrations. Second, a UNESCO-linked heritage documentation programme covering the old city — specifically the Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu conservation zones — reached a critical audit phase this spring, and the duplicate-image problem is holding up the publication of a joint digital catalogue that has been in preparation for several years.

A Problem Built Layer by Layer Since the 1990s

The roots of the duplication crisis stretch back to 1994, when the municipality first began scanning physical archive materials without a unified file-naming convention. Different departments — urban planning, heritage conservation, the Istanbul Water and Sewerage Administration known as İSKİ — each built their own siloed databases. The Istanbul Archaeological Museums on Osman Hamdi Bey Yokuşu in Sultanahmet maintained a separate photo library with its own cataloguing logic. The Atatürk Library in Taksim, which holds the single largest collection of historical Istanbul photography, operated on yet another system.

When the municipality migrated to a centralised server infrastructure in 2011, technicians moved files without resolving the underlying naming conflicts. A 2019 internal audit — details of which were shared with this newspaper by a municipal official who was not authorised to speak on the record — identified more than 340,000 image files flagged as probable duplicates. That figure has grown since, as pandemic-era digitisation drives added new material without fixing the old architecture.

The financial dimension is not trivial. Storage costs for redundant files across municipal data centres in Kagıthane and Maltepe run into hundreds of thousands of lira per year, a figure made more painful by the lira's sustained weakness. Licensing complications have also emerged: several images digitised from private collections in the early 2000s now appear in public-facing municipal websites without the rights clearances their original agreements required, according to the remediation proposal summary seen by The Daily Istanbul.

What a Fix Actually Requires

The proposed solution circulating inside the culture directorate involves adopting a Dublin Core metadata standard across all municipal image repositories, a process that archivists in comparable European cities — Madrid's Archivo General de la Villa completed a similar migration between 2017 and 2021 — have found takes longer and costs more than initial estimates suggest. For Istanbul, the draft proposal sets a 30-month timeline and an initial budget allocation of 18 million lira for the first phase alone, covering only the pre-1980 photographic holdings.

The Rahmi M. Koç Museum on the Golden Horn waterfront in Hasköy and the SALT Galata research centre on Bankalar Caddesi have both developed in-house deduplication workflows that municipal archivists have been studying as potential models. Neither institution operates at the scale the municipality requires, but both have demonstrated that systematic image-hash comparison combined with human curatorial review can clear backlogs faster than manual checking alone.

For researchers, journalists, and heritage professionals who rely on these collections, the practical advice for now is straightforward: cross-reference any image sourced from the municipal portal against the Atatürk Library's own catalogue and the SALT Research online database before publication or use in legal or planning documents. The three systems carry overlapping holdings, and discrepancies in dating or location attribution are common enough to cause real problems downstream. The remediation timeline means the unified catalogue will not be ready before late 2028 at the earliest.