How Brussels Ended Up With Thousands of Duplicate Images Cluttering Its Public Records — And What Comes Next

Brussels' public administration is sitting on a digital mess years in the making. Across multiple city departments — from urban planning records held at the Urbanisme Brussels directorate to heritage documentation managed through Visit.brussels — tens of thousands of duplicate image files have embedded themselves into shared databases, complicating everything from permit processing to public communications.

The problem matters now because the Brussels-Capital Region is midway through a broader digital modernisation drive, IRISbox 3.0, which began rolling out in March 2025 and is scheduled for full deployment by the end of 2026. Cleaning up legacy data is a prerequisite for the new platform. Duplicate images clog storage, slow search functions, and — in the planning department's case — have on at least one occasion caused the wrong heritage photograph to appear on a public dossier for a listed building near the Place du Grand Sablon.

How the Duplication Problem Built Up Over Two Decades

The roots go back to 2004, when Brussels' nineteen communes began digitising their local archives without a common naming convention or shared metadata standard. Each commune — from Schaerbeek's sprawling administrative offices on the Rue de l'Église to the smaller Ixelles communal house on the Chaussée d'Ixelles — uploaded scans independently. When the region attempted to consolidate those archives under the CIRB, the Centre d'Informatique pour la Région Bruxelloise, images were frequently migrated more than once as formats changed from JPEG to TIFF and back again. Every migration wave left ghost copies.

Photography budgets made things worse. Between 2010 and 2020, several departments — including Bruxelles Environnement and the urban development arm perspective.brussels — commissioned overlapping photo shoots of the same public spaces. The Parc du Cinquantenaire alone appears in at least four separate commissioned libraries, each filed under different project codes and none cross-referenced with the others. Staff working under deadline pressure simply uploaded new images rather than searching for existing ones.

The shift to remote working after March 2020 accelerated the disorder. Without centralised oversight, individual civil servants created local copies of image folders on personal drives and then re-uploaded them to shared servers when the office reopened. The CIRB's own internal audit, completed in late 2024, identified more than 47,000 duplicate or near-duplicate image files across the regional administration's shared document management system, representing roughly 1.8 terabytes of redundant data.

The Push Toward a Fix

The IRISbox 3.0 rollout has made the cleanup impossible to defer. The new platform uses a unified Digital Asset Management module — procured through a public tender awarded to a consortium including Cronos Group in 2024 — that flags duplicate files automatically using perceptual hashing, a technique that identifies visually identical images even when file names differ. But the tool cannot fix what it finds on its own. Human review is required for borderline cases, and the regional administration has reportedly contracted a data management firm to work through the backlog commune by commune.

Schaerbeek and Etterbeek have already completed their preliminary de-duplication passes as pilot communes. The remaining seventeen are expected to finish before the IRISbox 3.0 hard deadline of December 31, 2026. Staff across departments are being asked to follow a new protocol — published in April 2026 on the CIRB's intranet — that requires a mandatory search of the shared library before any new image upload is approved.

For residents and businesses dealing with the city's planning and permit systems, the practical effect should eventually be faster processing times and fewer errors in publicly posted dossiers. The listed-building photograph error near the Grand Sablon, for instance, took six weeks to correct because staff could not easily trace which of three duplicate files was authoritative. Under the new system, a single master file with a verified metadata tag should make such corrections a matter of minutes. The road to that point has been long and largely self-inflicted — but the map, at least, now exists.