Barcelona's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Visual Identity

Barcelona's municipal communications office is sitting on a problem that has quietly ballooned over the past three years: an estimated backlog of duplicate and near-identical images stored across at least four separate city-run digital repositories, creating confusion for journalists, designers, licensing bodies and the Ajuntament's own departments. The question is no longer how bad the overlap is. It is what comes next.

The issue gained urgency this spring when the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, which manages the city's visual archives alongside the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona on Plaça de Pons i Clerch in the Sant Pere neighbourhood, flagged overlapping asset records that were inflating storage costs and generating licensing conflicts. Two images of the same subject — say, the Mercat de Santa Caterina facade at dusk — might carry different rights status in different systems, leaving a graphic designer or a news desk uncertain which version is legally cleared for publication.

This matters now for a specific reason. Mayor Jaume Collboni's administration is currently expanding its digital services platform ahead of a projected 2027 relaunch of the city's main tourism portal, a project linked to the broader push to reposition Barcelona away from mass-market cruise visitors toward higher-spending, longer-stay tourists. A cluttered, legally ambiguous image library is a liability that could delay that launch or expose the Ajuntament to copyright disputes precisely when its communications strategy is under the most scrutiny.

The Scale of the Problem

Figures from the Arxiu Fotogràfic's publicly reported 2024 annual review indicated the archive holds more than 400,000 digitised items. When cross-referenced with assets held by Barcelona Turisme and the separate repository managed by Barcelona Regional, the urban planning agency on Carrer de la Marina, internal auditors identified several thousand records flagged as probable or confirmed duplicates. The precise deduplicated count has not been made public, but the audit process itself cost an estimated €85,000 in contractor hours, according to procurement records published on the Ajuntament's transparency portal earlier this year.

The core technical decision involves which deduplication standard to adopt. Perceptual hashing — a method that identifies visually similar images even when file names or metadata differ — is the approach favoured by institutions including the Europeana network, which already ingests content from Catalan cultural bodies. The alternative, a manual curatorial review prioritising rights clearance over visual similarity, is slower and more expensive but produces fewer false positives. The Institut de Cultura has not publicly announced which route it will take.

Three Decisions That Cannot Wait

Procurement for a new digital asset management system, expected to go to tender in the final quarter of 2026, will lock in whichever technical standard the city chooses. That tender deadline is effectively the first hard checkpoint. Miss it and the 2027 portal launch timeline becomes difficult to defend.

The second decision concerns governance. Right now, no single body has authority over all four repositories. The Consell de l'Arxiu de Barcelona, the advisory body that oversees the Arxiu Municipal, has a mandate that arguably does not extend to the commercially managed assets held by Barcelona Turisme, which operates partly as a public-private consortium. Clarifying that jurisdictional question — either by giving one body primacy or by creating a shared metadata standard — is a prerequisite for any technical fix to hold.

The third is the question of public access. The Eixample-based design and creative sector, one of the largest clusters of its kind in southern Europe, has long pushed for a freely licensed creative commons tier within the city's archives. A deduplication project that simply deletes redundant files without addressing access rights misses a commercial and reputational opportunity. Barcelona's Poblenou innovation district, home to dozens of studios and tech firms that regularly licence city imagery, would be an immediate beneficiary of a cleaner, openly accessible archive.

The Ajuntament has until roughly October to signal which direction it is heading before the procurement window closes. How it resolves these three interlocking questions — technology standard, governance authority, and access policy — will determine whether the spring audit becomes a genuine turning point or simply an expensive exercise in identifying a problem nobody yet owns.