Barcelona's Digital Archives Race to Fix a Duplicate Image Crisis Swamping City Records

Barcelona's Ajuntament confirmed this week that a coordinated cleanup of duplicate images across its digital asset management systems is underway, after an internal audit found that tens of thousands of redundant files had accumulated across platforms used by municipal departments, tourism bodies and cultural institutions. The problem, years in the making, came to a head in late June when the city's open-data portal — accessible via the Ajuntament de Barcelona website — began returning search errors linked to file conflicts in the image repository.

The timing matters. With the tourist tax recently expanded under Mayor Jaume Collboni's administration and the city under growing pressure to modernise its public communications infrastructure, the integrity of digital records has taken on fresh urgency. Several city-sponsored initiatives — including the Pla de Turisme Sostenible and the new short-term rental enforcement dashboard — depend on clean, correctly tagged image databases to function properly in public-facing portals.

Where the Problem Surfaced

The duplication issue was traced to at least three separate content pipelines. The Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, headquartered near the Palau de la Virreina on La Rambla, had been ingesting images from multiple legacy systems without deduplication checks since a platform migration in early 2024. Separately, Barcelona Turisme — the city's official tourism promotion body, based in Plaça de Catalunya — was found to have replicated hundreds of promotional photographs across two asset libraries during a rebranding exercise last autumn. Staff working across both organisations had been pulling from whichever repository loaded fastest, creating cascading copies with inconsistent metadata tags.

The Consorci de Biblioteques de Barcelona, which manages 40 public library branches across the city including the Biblioteca Jaume Fuster in Gràcia and the Biblioteca Sant Pau i Santa Creu in the Raval, also reported a smaller-scale version of the same issue affecting its digitised local history collections. Librarians flagged the problem to the city's IT directorate in May.

What the Cleanup Actually Involves

The remediation work, which began formally on June 30, involves deploying a perceptual hashing algorithm — a technique that identifies visually identical or near-identical images regardless of filename or format — across the unified municipal content management system. According to documentation published on the Ajuntament's transparency portal on July 2, the audit identified more than 47,000 candidate duplicate files across six departmental repositories. The cleanup is expected to reduce total stored image volume by roughly 30 percent once completed, freeing server capacity currently contracted from a Barcelona-based provider at the Parc Tecnològic del Vallès data centre in Cerdanyola del Vallès.

The cost of the remediation contract, awarded without public tender under an emergency clause, has not been disclosed. The Ajuntament's digital services department set an internal deadline of July 18 to complete the first phase, covering the tourism and culture portfolios.

The episode has drawn attention from tech and civic groups in Barcelona's startup ecosystem. The Barcelona Tech City association, headquartered at the Pier01 hub in the Barceloneta waterfront complex, has been quietly lobbying for city hall to adopt open-source digital asset management standards that would prevent this kind of accumulation by design. The issue also feeds into a broader debate about municipal digital infrastructure that has surfaced repeatedly in the city council's Comissió de Presidència i Règim Interior since 2025.

For residents and researchers who rely on the open-data portal — particularly journalists, urban planners and housing activists tracking the rental crackdown in Eixample and Poble Sec — the practical advice is straightforward: treat any image downloads from the Ajuntament repository as potentially unstable until after July 18. The portal's status page, updated daily, will flag when each departmental archive has been cleared and reindexed. Anyone who has embedded direct image links from the municipal CDN in external websites or publications should audit those links before the end of the month, as URLs pointing to deprecated duplicate files will return 404 errors once the cleanup is finalised.