Barcelona's Digital Archives Are Full of Duplicate Images — Officials and Experts Are Calling for a Fix

Barcelona's municipal digital archive is sitting on a problem that officials can no longer ignore. Thousands of duplicate images — redundant photographs, maps and planning visuals scattered across public-facing platforms — are clogging the city's data systems, slowing public-access portals and complicating the work of urban planners and housing inspectors who rely on accurate, current visual records. The issue has moved from a technical footnote to an administrative priority in recent months, with voices across city hall, the academic sector and the private tech industry now pressing for a structured replacement programme.

The timing is not accidental. Barcelona's Ajuntament has accelerated its digital transformation push under Mayor Jaume Collboni's office, with the city's 2024–2027 Digital Action Plan committing to leaner, faster public data infrastructure. Duplicated visual content undermines that goal directly. Housing inspectors working out of the Habitatge department, for instance, have flagged cases where outdated images of short-term rental properties on the Liv Barcelona platform — used to cross-reference illegal tourist flats, particularly in Eixample and Sant Pere — conflict with more recent photographs pulled from licensing databases, creating verification delays at a moment when the city is aggressively enforcing its short-term rental crackdown.

What the Experts Are Saying

Specialists at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, which runs one of Spain's most active research groups in computer vision and urban data management, have been vocal about the structural nature of the problem. Researchers there have argued publicly, in academic forums and in presentations to city working groups, that ad hoc deletion of duplicate files is insufficient — what's needed is an automated deduplication pipeline integrated at the point of upload across all municipal platforms, not applied retrospectively to legacy databases after the damage is done. The UPC's BarcelonaTech campus on Carrer de Jordi Girona has hosted at least two working sessions in 2025 on this specific challenge, drawing participants from the Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona and the Institut Municipal d'Informàtica.

The Institut Municipal d'Informàtica, the body that manages city IT infrastructure, has not yet published a formal duplicate-image replacement policy, but internal documents circulated within the Ajuntament — and referenced in council committee minutes from March 2026 — indicate that a tendering process for deduplication tooling is under consideration. Industry representatives from Barcelona's 22@ tech district, where companies specialising in machine learning and image recognition are clustered along Carrer de Pallars and the surrounding blocks of Poblenou, say they have been in preliminary contact with city officials about potential contracts. No figures or timelines have been confirmed publicly.

The Scale of the Problem

Getting precise numbers is difficult because no single audit has been completed and published. However, a 2024 report by the Consorci Localret — the Catalan consortium that supports digital services for local governments — found that Catalan municipalities collectively held an estimated 30 percent data redundancy rate across their visual asset databases, a figure that local technologists say is consistent with what they observe in Barcelona's own systems. At current storage costs for public-sector cloud infrastructure in Spain, running at roughly €0.023 per gigabyte per month under standard government procurement frameworks, the financial argument for deduplication is straightforward even before accounting for the operational drag on platform performance.

There is also a reputational dimension. The city's Open Data BCN portal, which publishes urban planning imagery and neighbourhood maps for public and developer use, has drawn criticism from civic tech groups — including members of the Code for Europe network active in Barcelona — for serving outdated or redundant visuals that undercut the portal's stated commitment to accuracy.

For now, the practical advice from specialists is consistent: organisations and city departments using Barcelona's public image repositories should apply hash-based deduplication checks before integrating visual assets into their own tools, and should flag discrepancies through the Open Data BCN feedback channel. A city-wide policy response, whenever it arrives, will take time to implement. Until then, the redundant images stay where they are — and the inspectors, planners and developers working around them carry on making do.