How Brussels Let Its Public Image Archive Fall Into Disrepair — And What Officials Are Now Doing About It

Brussels officials are moving to overhaul the capital region's fragmented stock photography system after an internal audit flagged thousands of duplicate and low-quality images embedded across more than 40 municipal websites — a problem that, administrators acknowledge, traces back to decisions made as far back as 2015 when the city began migrating its communications infrastructure to a shared content management platform.

The issue matters now because the Brussels Capital Region is midway through a €2.3 million digital modernisation programme, overseen by the regional agency Innoviris and tied to a broader urban communications strategy adopted by the Brussels Parliament in March 2026. Replacing duplicate imagery is not cosmetic housekeeping. Broken or repeated visuals slow page-load times, undermine accessibility standards required under the EU's Web Accessibility Directive, and — according to the audit circulated to regional IT departments last spring — cost money each time licensing fees are renewed for images that already exist elsewhere in the same content library.

The roots of the problem run straight through the way Brussels built its digital presence borough by borough, rather than from the centre outward. Each of the 19 communes — from Ixelles and Molenbeek-Saint-Jean to Etterbeek and Schaerbeek — maintained its own web presence, often commissioning separate photography contracts with different suppliers. Urban.brussels, the regional planning directorate headquartered on Rue du Progrès, ran its own image bank. Visit Brussels, the tourism body based near the Grand-Place, operated a third. The result by the early 2020s was a patchwork of overlapping files: the same aerial shot of the Atomium appearing under different filenames across seven separate servers, or near-identical photographs of the Flagey building in Ixelles duplicated across the commune site, the culture portal, and a climate communication campaign.

A Shared System That Became a Shared Mess

The 2015 shift to a centralised CMS — intended to unify back-end administration under Brussels Informatique, the regional IT body — paradoxically made the duplication worse in the short term. Migrating legacy content from individual commune servers meant bulk imports that carried over every redundant file. Nobody was tasked with deduplication. Between 2015 and 2021, the number of images stored across the shared environment more than tripled, reaching an estimated 180,000 assets, without a corresponding increase in the curation or metadata staff needed to manage them.

Photography licensing added financial pressure. The region pays annual subscription fees to at least three commercial image suppliers — contracts that were separately negotiated by Urban.brussels, by the Brussels Environment agency known as Bruxelles Environnement, and by the communications team at the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée area's local promotion office. The 2026 audit found overlapping coverage in those contracts representing tens of thousands of euros in redundant spend per year, though the exact figure has not been made public by the regional administration.

What Happens Now

The regional government is now piloting a single Digital Asset Management system, to be fully operational before the end of the first quarter of 2027. The pilot began in June at Urban.brussels and at the Ixelles commune digital team — chosen partly because both had already completed separate metadata audits. Every image uploaded after January 2026 is being tagged with a standardised taxonomy developed with input from the Royal Library of Belgium, which has experience managing large digitised collections.

For residents and local organisations that regularly request images for community publications or neighbourhood association websites — a common need in high-density communes like Saint-Gilles and Anderlecht — the practical change will be a single public-facing portal, expected to replace the current scattered download pages by early 2027. Images already in the public domain through Brussels commons licences will be clearly flagged. Those requiring attribution will carry standardised credit labels.

The lesson administrators draw from the past decade is straightforward: digital infrastructure requires the same long-term maintenance planning as physical infrastructure. A bridge on the canal network in Molenbeek does not look after itself between inspections. Neither, it turns out, does a photograph of it.