How Barcelona's Visual Identity Crisis Brought Duplicate Images to the Heart of City Communications

Barcelona's Ajuntament confirmed this week that an internal audit of digital assets used across its official platforms had identified hundreds of duplicate image files, some appearing as many as six times across different departments' websites, tourism portals and press-office archives. The problem, years in the making, has its roots in a digitisation rush that began in earnest around 2019 and accelerated sharply during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

The timing matters. Mayor Jaume Collboni has staked part of his term on a cleaner, more coherent projection of Barcelona to the outside world, particularly as the city tightens its short-term rental rules and pushes back against the volume of cruise traffic entering through the Port de Barcelona. A fragmented, visually inconsistent digital presence complicates that message at precisely the moment the city most needs to look organised.

A Rush to Digitise, a Failure to Coordinate

The story starts in the offices of Barcelona Activa, the municipal economic development agency headquartered on Carrer de Llacuna in the 22@ innovation district of Poblenou. In 2019, Barcelona Activa began building out a digital showcase for the city's startup ecosystem, pulling imagery from multiple municipal sources simultaneously. The Institut Municipal d'Informàtica — the city's IT arm — was running its own parallel migration of legacy files onto a centralised cloud server at the same time. Neither initiative had a shared taxonomy for image metadata.

By early 2021, when both projects converged under the umbrella of the Pla de Transformació Digital del sector públic municipal, staff discovered that thousands of photographs — many taken along La Rambla, in the Eixample grid, and around the Parc de la Ciutadella — had been uploaded multiple times under different file names, different departments and different licensing tags. A photograph of the Arc de Triomf taken in 2017 for a tourism campaign, for instance, appeared in at least four separate departmental repositories by the time the audit began.

The practical consequences are not trivial. Duplicate images with conflicting rights metadata expose the Ajuntament to potential licensing disputes. Outdated photographs showing scaffolding-free facades or pre-renovation streetscapes create a gap between what the city publishes and what visitors actually find. And at a moment when the Foment del Turisme de Barcelona and the city's own Turisme de Barcelona agency are trying to project carefully managed destination messaging, visual incoherence undermines the effort.

What the Audit Found — and What Comes Next

The audit, carried out during the first half of 2026, examined assets held across more than a dozen municipal platforms. It found that roughly 30 percent of the image library contained files duplicated at least once, according to figures shared with staff in a May 2026 internal briefing document. The Eixample and Barceloneta were the most photographed neighbourhoods in the archive, together accounting for a disproportionate share of the redundant files.

Correcting the problem involves more than deleting extras. Each duplicate must be checked against its rights-clearance record, cross-referenced with the originating department, and then either retired or consolidated into the city's new DAM — digital asset management — system, which went live on a pilot basis in March 2026. That system, built on infrastructure managed through the Institut Municipal d'Informàtica's data centre on Carrer de Bolivia, is designed to prevent the same problem recurring by requiring unique metadata tagging at the point of upload.

For residents and local organisations that licence city-owned images for community projects, the practical advice for now is straightforward: request assets directly through the Ajuntament's official digital media portal rather than pulling files from cached third-party sources, where duplicates with incorrect licensing information are most likely to surface. The city has indicated a full reconciliation of the archive is expected to complete before the end of 2026's third quarter — though the breadth of the backlog means that deadline may prove optimistic.