Barcelona's Digital Records Riddled With Duplicate Images — And Residents Are Paying the Price

Tens of thousands of files held by Barcelona's municipal administration contain duplicate or mismatched images — photographs attached to the wrong property records, planning submissions with repeated identical scans, and rental licence applications flagged for manual review because the system cannot distinguish one uploaded photo from another. The problem, confirmed through documents reviewed by The Daily Barcelona, is creating bottlenecks across multiple city departments and adding weeks to processing times for ordinary residents.

The timing is particularly sharp. Mayor Jaume Collboni's office has made the accelerated licensing of Barcelona's short-term rental crackdown a political priority for 2026, promising faster decisions on which properties qualify under the city's tightened Habitatge d'Ús Turístic regulations. But if the databases underpinning those decisions are contaminated with duplicate imagery — a single flat in the Gràcia neighbourhood, for example, appearing under three separate file entries each carrying the same set of photographs — the automated verification systems that the city has invested in cannot function as intended.

Where the Backlog Bites Hardest

The neighbourhoods feeling it most acutely are those where the housing and licensing pressure is already extreme. In the Eixample, where the density of short-term rental disputes is among the highest in the city, residents who submitted documentation to the Institut Municipal d'Urbanisme before the March 31 deadline for the new rental review cycle are still waiting. Some cases remain unresolved more than three months later, according to records requests filed by community groups in the Sant Antoni and Fort Pienc districts.

The issue is not confined to rentals. The Oficina de l'Habitatge on Carrer de Llull, which handles social housing applications across the Sant Martí district, has reported a spike in incomplete-file notifications sent back to applicants — many of whom uploaded photos of their current homes as supporting evidence for subsidy claims, only to have those images flagged as potential duplicates of unrelated records already sitting in the system. For families on waiting lists for Barcelona's publicly subsidised Habitatge Metropolità stock, a returned application means restarting a queue that already stretches years.

The root cause, according to the technical specification published by the Ajuntament de Barcelona in its 2025 Digital Transformation Plan, is the absence of a unified deduplication layer across legacy databases that were merged during the city's 2019-2022 administrative consolidation. That consolidation brought together records from 73 separate municipal services. Not all of them used compatible image-tagging standards, meaning thousands of files entered the unified system carrying metadata that the newer platform cannot reliably sort.

What the City Is Doing — and What Residents Can Do Now

The Ajuntament has contracted a technical review of its document management infrastructure, with completion scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026. The contract, valued at €1.4 million according to the public procurement notice published on the Perfil del Contractant portal in May 2026, covers automated deduplication tools and staff retraining across four departments including Urban Planning and Housing.

Until that work is complete, the practical advice from community legal services is straightforward. Residents submitting any documentation to the city — whether for a rental licence, a planning query, or a housing subsidy — should use clearly labelled, uniquely named image files rather than the default filenames generated by smartphones, which are frequently identical across different applicants. The Associació de Veïns de l'Esquerra de l'Eixample has been distributing a one-page guidance sheet at its offices on Carrer del Consell de Cent advising exactly this since June.

The city has also opened a dedicated review track at the Oficina d'Atenció Ciutadana on Plaça de Sant Miquel for applicants who receive a duplicate-image rejection notice — a small concession that at least offers a faster path back into the queue for those who know to ask for it. Most residents, understandably, do not.