Barcelona's Digital Archives Are Full of Duplicate Images. Officials and Experts Say the Fix Is Overdue.

Barcelona's municipal digital infrastructure is carrying tens of thousands of duplicate image files across at least three major public databases, according to city technology staff who have been pushing for a systematic deduplication programme since early 2025. The problem is not abstract: redundant images consume server capacity, slow down public-facing platforms, and complicate the legal compliance work that agencies must complete under Spain's data governance framework.

The issue has sharpened this summer because Ajuntament de Barcelona is mid-rollout on its updated Open Data BCN portal, which went into an expanded beta phase in March 2026. Librarians and archivists working on the Arxiu Municipal Contemporani de Barcelona, housed on Carrer de Bisbe Caçador in the Gothic Quarter, flagged the duplication problem formally in a working document circulated to the city's Direcció de Serveis d'Innovació last autumn. That document, which The Daily Barcelona has reviewed, described redundant image records running into six figures across heritage and urban planning catalogues.

What the Experts Are Pointing To

Specialists in digital asset management who work with Catalan public institutions say the root cause is straightforward: successive platform migrations over the past decade — from legacy city systems to cloud-based infrastructure — were done without consistent deduplication protocols. Each migration copied existing assets wholesale rather than auditing them first. The result is layer upon layer of near-identical photographs of landmarks such as the Sagrada Família construction site, Parc de la Ciutadella events, and Barceloneta beach seasonal surveys, stored in parallel across platforms that were never designed to talk to each other.

Pep Vilanova, a digital preservation consultant who has worked with the Consorci de Biblioteques de Catalunya, has written publicly on the problem in the consortium's own technical bulletins. He has described deduplication as a governance issue as much as a technical one — institutions need clear ownership rules before automated tools can safely delete anything. Without that framework, deleting what appears to be a copy can strip a record of its original provenance metadata. His position, laid out in a February 2026 bulletin, is that Barcelona's institutions should adopt a hash-based fingerprinting standard before any mass deletion runs begin.

At the private-sector level, the short-term rental crackdown has created its own duplication problem. When Ajuntament de Barcelona began deregistering unlicensed tourist apartments through its 2024 enforcement campaign — which targeted roughly 10,000 listings across Eixample, Gràcia and Sant Martí — property images from those delisted platforms were scraped and re-uploaded to secondary rental sites. Technology staff at the Institut Municipal d'Urbanisme have noted internally that the same apartment photographs now circulate across multiple platforms, some still advertising properties whose licences were revoked.

The Practical Stakes for the City

Storage is not cheap. Municipal IT contracts reviewed by this newspaper show Barcelona's cloud storage spend rose to approximately €4.2 million in 2025, a figure that city councillors on the Comissió de Presidència, Drets de Ciutadania i Participació cited in November budget hearings when pressing for efficiency audits. Deduplication, according to the same technical working document from the Arxiu Municipal, could theoretically recover between 15 and 30 percent of active image storage — a meaningful reduction at that budget scale.

The startup ecosystem centred on the 22@ innovation district in Poblenou has not been idle. At least two Barcelona-based companies — neither yet at a scale that makes them publicly nameable with precision — have pitched deduplication-as-a-service tools to the Ajuntament through the city's procurement innovation window, which accepts unsolicited technology proposals under a framework updated in January 2026. City sources familiar with the process say both pitches are under preliminary review.

For institutions waiting on clearer guidance, the practical next step is the Generalitat de Catalunya's digital governance roadmap, which is expected to include image asset standards when its full update is published later this year. Archivists at the Arxiu Municipal Contemporani say they have paused large-scale uploads to the Open Data BCN portal pending that guidance. Meanwhile, the duplicate images sit where they have always sat — costing money, cluttering searches, and waiting for someone to decide which copy is the real one.