Tel Aviv Takes On the Digital Clutter Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Amsterdam and Seoul

Tel Aviv's municipal open-data portal, maintained through the Tel Aviv-Yafo Digital Department, has spent the better part of 2026 working through a backlog of duplicate images embedded in city-facing services — street guides, event listings, neighbourhood profiles — that have accumulated across platforms since a major content migration in late 2023. The scale is not trivial. Internal audits reviewed by city council committees this spring flagged several thousand redundant image files across the portal's public-facing directories, creating load problems and confusing residents trying to navigate services from Florentin to the Sarona district.

The issue matters now because Tel Aviv, like dozens of mid-to-large cities globally, has been on an aggressive digitisation push. When content migrates fast — from legacy CMS systems to modern cloud infrastructure — duplicate images multiply in the background. Nobody sees them at first. Then suddenly the parks department page for HaYarkon Park is pulling three versions of the same aerial photograph, and the load time doubles. Residents filing noise complaints via the city's digital 311-equivalent, known locally as Digi-Tel, began reporting interface slowdowns earlier this year, prompting the audit.

What Tel Aviv Is Actually Doing About It

The city's Digital Department, based in the municipality building on Ibn Gabirol Street, has reportedly adopted a semi-automated deduplication workflow using hash-matching software to identify pixel-identical or near-identical image files before a human editor makes a final call on which version to retain. The approach is pragmatic rather than cutting-edge. It does not use generative AI to replace deleted images — a point that distinguishes it from some peer cities.

Amsterdam's municipal digital services team announced in March 2026 that it had completed a similar deduplication exercise across its city portal, removing more than 18,000 redundant image assets over six months, according to a published case study from the city's Chief Technology Office. Amsterdam went a step further: deleted images were replaced automatically using a library of licensed municipal photography, with no manual re-upload required. Seoul's Smart City Division, which manages one of the most traffic-heavy municipal portals in the world, has used AI-assisted image tagging since 2024 to prevent duplicates from entering the system in the first place — a prevention model rather than a cleanup model.

Tel Aviv is somewhere between the two approaches. Digi-Tel, which had approximately 850,000 registered users as of the municipality's 2025 annual report, serves as the city's primary resident-facing digital layer. Any image degradation in that system has a direct effect on how residents interact with services ranging from parking permit renewals in Neve Tzedek to building permit tracking in Ramat Aviv. The Digital Department has not published a completion timeline for the deduplication project, but council discussions in May indicated the bulk of the work was expected to wrap before the High Holiday period in autumn 2026.

The Broader Lesson for Urban Digital Infrastructure

The comparison with Amsterdam and Seoul is instructive precisely because it shows three different philosophical responses to the same technical problem. Amsterdam cleaned up reactively, then built a replacement pipeline. Seoul invested upstream, catching duplicates before they landed. Tel Aviv is cleaning up reactively, but has not yet publicly committed to a systemic prevention layer.

Cities that have let duplicate-image problems fester longest — Rome's municipal portal was cited in a 2025 European Commission digital-services review as carrying significant redundant media load — tend to face compounding costs. Storage is relatively cheap, but user-experience degradation is not, particularly when residents increasingly expect the same performance from a city website that they get from a commercial app.

For Tel Aviv residents, the practical near-term effect should be faster load times on the Digi-Tel app and cleaner image presentation in neighbourhood guides covering areas like the Port of Tel Aviv and Rothschild Boulevard. The Digital Department has a public feedback channel through the municipality website. Residents who notice persistent image errors or broken thumbnails in city-facing platforms are encouraged to flag them directly — the kind of distributed quality control that both Amsterdam and Seoul credit as part of what made their own cleanup exercises faster than expected.