How Istanbul's Street Sign Crisis Became a War Over Duplicate Images

Walk down Istiklal Caddesi on any given afternoon and you will pass at least a dozen blue municipal information panels, each carrying a QR code linking to Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's digital district guide. Scan enough of them and a pattern emerges: the same stock photograph of the Galata Tower appears behind descriptions of at least four separate Beyoğlu sub-districts, sometimes cropped differently, sometimes not cropped at all. This is the duplicate image problem, and it is older than most people realise.

The issue matters now because the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality — known by its Turkish acronym IBB — is midway through a 2025-2027 digital infrastructure overhaul that includes a full audit of its public-facing content management system. Procurement documents published on the municipality's official portal in March 2026 show the IBB contracted a local technology firm to de-duplicate roughly 340,000 digital assets held across departmental servers. That contract, valued in the tender documents at just over 18 million Turkish lira, set a deadline of September 2026 for the first phase of remediation.

How the Archives Got So Cluttered

The roots of the problem stretch back to the early 2000s, when the municipality's various directorates — transport, tourism, urban planning, cultural heritage — each built their own databases independently. The IBB's Department of Geographic Information Systems, headquartered in the Saraçhane administrative complex near Şehzadebaşı, ran one image library. The Istanbul Tourism and Promotion Bureau, operating out of offices in Sultanahmet, maintained a separate one. Nobody enforced a shared naming convention, and nobody required staff to check whether an image already existed before uploading a new version.

By 2015, when the municipality began consolidating those systems onto a single cloud-based platform, the damage was already substantial. Internal migration logs seen by The Daily Istanbul show that more than 60,000 image files were flagged as probable duplicates during that first consolidation exercise, but the technical directive at the time instructed staff to archive rather than delete, on the basis that deletion carried legal risk under Turkish public records law. The files stayed. They were simply moved to a different folder.

The 2019 local election, which brought CHP's Ekrem Imamoğlu to the mayor's office, added a political dimension. The new administration inherited not only the bloated archive but also a legacy of incomplete digitisation projects, several of which had been outsourced to vendors who retained partial rights to the original image files. Untangling those contracts took the better part of two years. Meanwhile, every new tourism campaign — Kapalıçarşı restoration coverage, Boğaz bridge anniversary content, pandemic-era virtual tour packages — added fresh layers of near-identical photographs to the pile.

What the Clean-Up Actually Involves

The 2026 audit is more systematic than previous attempts. The contracted firm is using perceptual hashing, a technique that compares images by visual fingerprint rather than filename, to identify matches that earlier keyword searches missed. According to the March 2026 tender specification, the tool must achieve a false-positive rate below 2 percent before any file is flagged for human review.

Archivists at the Atatürk Library on Mete Caddesi in Taksim are also involved, cross-referencing the digital assets against the library's physical photograph collection to determine which images carry historical value that might justify keeping multiple versions at different resolutions. That collaboration was formalised in a memorandum signed in January 2026 between the IBB's Digital Transformation Directorate and the library's management board.

The practical stakes are straightforward. Redundant images slow the city's public-facing applications, increase storage costs, and — perhaps most visibly — produce the kind of cartographic confusion that frustrates the roughly 18 million tourists who visited Istanbul in 2024, according to figures published by the Turkish Statistical Institute. When a visitor's mapping app shows four identical photographs for four supposedly distinct neighbourhoods, the credibility of the entire information system erodes.

The September 2026 deadline for phase one covers only the tourism and transport image libraries. Cultural heritage and urban planning archives will follow in a second phase running through mid-2027. For residents and visitors, the most visible change will come first in the QR-linked district guides — the ones that currently tell you, repeatedly, that the Galata Tower is everywhere at once.