Brussels Residents Speak Out as Duplicate Image Problem Blights Neighbourhood Noticeboards and City Portals

A persistent problem with duplicate and recycled images on Brussels city council noticeboards, neighbourhood newsletters and the official be.brussels digital portal has prompted a wave of frustration among residents across several communes, with community groups now formally calling for a coordinated fix before the autumn municipal consultation cycle opens in September 2026.

The issue matters now because Brussels is midway through a significant push to modernise local civic communications. The Brussels Capital Region's Digital Transition programme, launched in 2024, committed to unifying the 19 communes under a single content management framework by the end of 2026. That deadline is looking fragile. When the same photograph of the Place du Châtelain market — taken at least four years ago, before the 2022 repaving works — appears to illustrate five separate news items about different topics in the same fortnight, residents notice. And they talk.

Same Faces, Same Squares, Different Stories

Residents in Ixelles have been among the most vocal. The commune's monthly PDF newsletter, distributed to roughly 28,000 households, ran an identical stock image of the Étangs d'Ixelles footpath three times between January and May 2026, each time attached to an unrelated article — once about winter gritting, once about school enrolment, and once about a local jazz event. Community association Ixelles Citoyens, based on Rue du Magistrat, raised the duplication formally with the commune's communications office in March. A written response acknowledged the problem but cited staff shortages in the graphic content team.

In Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, residents who use the local Facebook group Molenbeek Actif — which has more than 12,000 members — have posted side-by-side comparisons showing how a single image of the canal towpath near the Pont de Ninove has been reused to illustrate articles about cycling infrastructure, flood prevention and neighbourhood clean-up days. The visual confusion, members argue, makes it genuinely hard to tell old announcements from new ones.

The problem is not unique to those two communes. Anderlecht's community sports centre, Centre Sportif de la Roue on Rue de la Roue, posted a notice in April using a photograph of its main hall that predates the 2023 renovation, showing facilities that no longer exist in their depicted form. Residents who showed up expecting the old layout found a different arrangement, generating complaints to the centre's front desk.

Why Duplication Keeps Happening — and What It Costs

The structural reason is straightforward: the 19 communes do not share a single image library. Each maintains its own archive, and staff frequently reach for whichever photo loads first from a local folder rather than commissioning or licensing a new one. The Brussels Capital Region's 2025 annual report on digital services noted that content management inconsistencies had been flagged across 11 of the 19 communes during the year's internal audits, though it did not detail the specific nature of those inconsistencies.

Licensing fresh photography is not cheap. A single commissioned shoot of a Brussels neighbourhood can cost between €400 and €900 depending on the photographer and usage rights, according to standard rates published by the Union Professionnelle Belge des Photographes. For communications teams operating on tight budgets, the temptation to reuse is obvious. But community groups argue the false economy damages the credibility of announcements that residents actually need to act on — bin collection changes, road closures, social services updates.

Ixelles Citoyens has proposed a shared, Creative Commons-licensed image bank specifically for Brussels public communications, modelled loosely on similar projects in Amsterdam and Ghent. The idea has been submitted to the Region's Digital Transition steering committee and is listed for discussion at the committee's next session, scheduled for 16 September 2026.

For residents, the practical advice is blunt: if a photograph attached to an official notice looks familiar or dated, check the article's publication date and, where possible, confirm the information directly with the relevant commune's helpdesk. For Ixelles, that line is open weekdays at the maison communale on Chaussée d'Ixelles 168. For Molenbeek, the communications office sits inside the town hall on Rue du Comte de Flandre. The images may lie about what a place looks like. The phone number still works.