Barcelona's Urban Photography Archives Get a Makeover: The Push to Fix Duplicate Images This Week

Barcelona's municipal digital archive, managed through the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona on Carrer de l'Arxiu, has spent this week sorting through a backlog of duplicate images that have accumulated across its publicly accessible collections — a problem that archivists say has grown more acute since the city expanded its digitisation drive in 2024. The effort is part of a broader push by the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) to rationalise its online holdings before a planned public relaunch later this year.

The timing matters. Barcelona's institutions have been under mounting pressure to make their digital assets more navigable as the city bets heavily on its reputation as a tech and creative hub. With Mayor Jaume Collboni's administration prioritising the innovation economy in the Eixample and Poblenou 22@ districts, having bloated, unreliable image databases sends the wrong signal to the design studios, content agencies and startups that have clustered in those neighbourhoods.

What Happened This Week

Staff at the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona confirmed this week that a systematic deduplication review is underway, targeting historical urban photography collections covering the Barceloneta seafront, the Gràcia neighbourhood and the old industrial belt along the Avinguda Diagonal. The review was triggered after an internal audit found that a significant proportion of catalogue entries in certain thematic folders — particularly images tagged to urban development projects from the 2010s — were exact or near-exact duplicates that had been uploaded multiple times during successive migration processes.

The Centre de Documentació i Museu de les Arts Escèniques, based in the Palau Güell on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, is running a parallel deduplication exercise on its theatrical photography holdings, according to documentation published on the ICUB website earlier this week. Both projects are using open-source image-matching software to flag candidates for removal before human archivists make the final call on what stays and what gets pulled.

For the city's wider creative sector, the cleanup has practical consequences. Freelance photographers and media organisations regularly license images from Barcelona's public archives. Duplicate entries inflate search results, slow down database queries and occasionally generate licensing confusion when two entries for the same photograph carry different metadata — including, in some cases, different credited photographers. The Associació de Fotògrafs Professionals de Catalunya, which represents working photographers across the region, has flagged the metadata inconsistency problem in submissions to the city council over the past eighteen months.

Scope and What Comes Next

The Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona's online collection runs to more than 200,000 digitised items, a figure the institution published in its 2025 annual report. ICUB's current digitisation contract, renewed in January 2026, includes a quality-control clause that specifically addresses duplicate suppression — a requirement that was absent from the previous agreement signed in 2021. That contractual gap is widely credited with allowing the duplication problem to compound over four years of accelerated scanning work.

The deduplication project is expected to conclude its first phase by the end of September 2026, according to the ICUB project timeline document. A second phase, covering audiovisual materials held at the Filmoteca de Catalunya on Plaça de Salvador Seguí in the Raval, is pencilled in to begin in early 2027. Officials have not yet published a figure for how many duplicate entries they expect to remove, though the scope of the audit suggests the number runs into the thousands.

For journalists, researchers and designers who rely on these collections, the practical advice right now is straightforward: cross-check any image downloaded from the Arxiu Fotogràfic portal against the institution's metadata before publication or licensing, since some entries flagged for removal may temporarily appear with conflicting attribution details during the review period. ICUB has said it will publish a revised catalogue interface — with cleaner search filters and verified credits — once the first deduplication phase wraps up in the autumn.