How Tehran's Public Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — and What Led Us Here

Tehran Municipality's digital archive, housed primarily at the Tehran Urban Planning and Research Centre on Vali-e-Asr Avenue, contains an estimated several hundred thousand duplicate photograph files accumulated across more than a decade of disjointed scanning projects. The problem, long known to database administrators inside the centre, has finally become a formal administrative headache as the municipality moves to consolidate civic records under its Shahrvand 360 integrated services platform.

The timing matters. Iran is navigating one of the most turbulent political moments in a generation, with the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei pushing questions of state continuity and institutional competence to the forefront. For Tehran's municipal bureaucracy, demonstrating that basic civic infrastructure — including public records management — is orderly has become a minor but symbolically loaded priority.

How the Duplication Problem Was Built, Layer by Layer

The roots go back to 2011, when Tehran Municipality launched its first large-scale digitisation drive, contracting separately with at least three technology firms to scan historical urban planning documents and neighbourhood photographs stored across district offices in Shemiran, Shahrak-e Gharb, and the older southern districts around Molavi Street. Each contractor used its own file-naming convention. None of the contracts required interoperability with the others.

A second wave of scanning began in 2017 under the Smart Tehran initiative, which focused specifically on streetscape photography for the city's geographic information system. That project ran through the Tehran ICT Organisation and, again, operated without a shared metadata standard with the earlier archive. The result was predictable: thousands of images of landmarks like the Azadi Tower, the Grand Bazaar entrance on 15 Khordad Street, and the Tabiat Bridge were captured, catalogued, and stored multiple times under different filenames, in different formats, by teams that had no visibility into what already existed.

Library and information professionals at the University of Tehran's Faculty of Management flagged the structural problem in a 2021 internal review, noting that without a single controlled vocabulary and a deduplication protocol, any future merger of municipal image databases would require enormous remediation work. That review did not lead to immediate action.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage is not free. Tehran Municipality's annual IT budget — a figure that municipal council members discussed in public session in March 2025 — runs into the hundreds of billions of rials, with data storage contracts accounting for a meaningful slice. Industry estimates suggest that duplicate files in large institutional archives routinely represent between 20 and 40 percent of total storage volume, though Tehran has not published a specific audit of its own duplication rate.

The Shahrvand 360 project, which the municipality began piloting in the Tajrish and Narmak districts in early 2025, requires pulling photographs from the legacy archive to populate neighbourhood service pages. Administrators working on that pilot told the municipality's internal bulletin — a public document reviewed for this article — that deduplication had to be addressed before the platform could go city-wide, because automated systems were retrieving multiple versions of the same image and flagging errors.

A working group drawn from the Tehran Urban Planning and Research Centre and the Tehran ICT Organisation was formally constituted in January 2026 with a mandate to develop a unified replacement and deduplication policy. Their working deadline, according to the same municipal bulletin, is the end of the current Iranian calendar year — meaning administrators have until late March 2027 to produce a protocol that can govern how duplicate images are identified, which version is retained as the canonical file, and how legacy contractors' work is reconciled.

For residents and civic groups, the practical upshot is straightforward: digital access to historical neighbourhood photographs through the municipality's online portal will likely be interrupted in phases as old files are reviewed and replaced. Community boards in districts like Elahieh and Amirabad have been advised in writing to download any archived images they rely on for local heritage documentation before the consolidation process begins. The municipality has not yet set a public notification timeline for when specific district archives will go offline during remediation.