Tel Aviv's Digital Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — And the Numbers Tell a Damaging Story

Tel Aviv's municipal digital infrastructure holds more than 4.2 million image files across its public-facing platforms, internal planning portals and cultural heritage databases — and a significant portion of those files, according to internal assessments reviewed by The Daily Tel Aviv, are duplicates. The cleanup effort now underway is exposing how badly the problem has metastasised over the past decade of rapid digitalisation.

The issue came into sharp focus earlier this year when the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality's Digital Transformation Office began a structured audit of its content management systems. Duplicate image replacement — the systematic process of identifying, consolidating and replacing redundant visual assets with single canonical versions — had been treated as a low-priority housekeeping task for years. That approach is changing, driven by storage costs, slower server response times and, crucially, legal questions about image licensing that arise when the same photograph sits in a system under two different metadata records.

The Scale of the Problem in Numbers

Storage is not free. The municipality's primary data centre, operated under a contract with servers located in the Gush Dan corridor, carries an estimated overhead cost of roughly 180,000 shekels per year for excess redundant-image storage alone, according to figures circulating inside the Digital Transformation Office. That estimate does not include the indirect costs: slower load times on the Tel Aviv Open Data portal, errors in the city's GIS mapping system used by planners in the Florentin and Neve Tzedek redevelopment zones, and staff hours spent manually resolving file conflicts.

A 2024 report by the Israel Internet Association found that public-sector websites in Israel average a page-load penalty of roughly 1.4 seconds attributable to unoptimised or duplicated media assets — a figure that compounds across millions of monthly visits to city services. Tel Aviv's own municipal portal, tel-aviv.gov.il, handles upward of 800,000 unique visitors per month. Even modest improvements from duplicate image replacement translate into measurable gains in user experience and server load.

The Tel Aviv Digital Humanities Lab at Tel Aviv University, which collaborates with the city on archiving projects tied to the White City UNESCO heritage sites along Rothschild Boulevard, flagged a related problem in March 2026: roughly 17 percent of the visual assets in one shared archive had at least one duplicate entry, often created when images were ingested from multiple contributing agencies without a deduplication step. In some cases, the same photograph of a Bauhaus-era building on Bialik Street appeared under three separate catalogue numbers with conflicting copyright attributions.

What Replacement Actually Involves — and What Comes Next

Duplicate image replacement is not simply deleting files. Each candidate duplicate must be verified against the canonical original using hash-matching software, then all internal links pointing to the old file must be redirected or rewritten. For a database the size of the municipality's, that is an iterative process. The Digital Transformation Office has contracted a local firm from the Tel Aviv Port tech cluster on the northern waterfront to develop an automated pipeline using perceptual hashing — a technique that catches visually identical images even when file formats differ.

The target completion date for the first phase, covering the planning and permits division, is December 2026. A second phase covering the cultural and tourism assets — including imagery associated with the Jaffa Old City heritage portfolio — is scheduled for the first quarter of 2027. Together, the two phases are projected to reduce the active image library by between 12 and 18 percent, freeing an estimated 9 terabytes of primary storage.

For residents and businesses who interact with city platforms — submitting building permit applications, browsing the municipal events calendar, or accessing archived planning maps for neighbourhoods like Lev Tel Aviv or Kikar HaMedina — the practical payoff will be faster, more reliable services and fewer instances of broken image links on official documents. Developers who use the city's open APIs for urban data projects should also check their pipelines: the deduplication process will deprecate a number of legacy file URLs, and the municipality plans to publish a migration guide no later than September 2026.