How Brussels Ended Up With Thousands of Duplicate Images in Its Public Records — and What Happens Next

Brussels Regional Informatics Centre, known as BRIC, confirmed this spring that a systematic audit of the city's shared digital asset libraries had uncovered tens of thousands of duplicate image files spread across at least four municipal databases. The problem did not arrive overnight. It is the product of more than a decade of fragmented digitisation work carried out at different speeds, under different mandates, and with almost no shared metadata standard between the Region's nineteen communes.

The timing matters because the Region is now halfway through its 2024–2029 Smart City Action Plan, which earmarks digital infrastructure consolidation as a core deliverable. Finding that a foundational layer of that infrastructure — the image archives used by planners, heritage offices and communications departments alike — is riddled with redundancy undermines the credibility of everything built on top of it. City officials cannot easily argue they are ready to centralise services if they cannot first confirm which photograph of the Atomium, or which street-level scan of the Rue des Bouchers, is the authoritative version.

How the Duplication Happened

The roots go back to 2012, when Urban.Brussels, the regional planning agency, launched its first large-scale scan of historic building façades across the Pentagon — the oldest part of the city centre, bordered by the small ring road. At the same time, the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique on Mont des Arts was running a parallel digitisation grant under European Regional Development Fund money, producing its own image sets of streetscapes and architectural details that overlapped significantly with Urban.Brussels' work. Neither institution was required to cross-check with the other before uploading files.

The same pattern repeated itself after the 2015 security lockdown, when multiple agencies rushed to document public spaces for operational planning. By 2019, when BRIC attempted its first cross-agency data inventory, staff identified image duplication as a known nuisance but categorised it as low priority. That assessment changed sharply in 2024 after the Region committed to a single integrated open-data portal, Brussels Open Data, which forced all contributing bodies to deposit assets into one shared environment. What had been separate silos suddenly sat in the same room, and the duplicates became impossible to ignore.

A 2025 internal working document, circulated among commune-level IT coordinators and later referenced in a BRIC quarterly report, estimated that between 18 and 22 percent of image files in the consolidated repository were either exact duplicates or near-identical variants differing only in resolution or file format. Across a library that by then contained more than 340,000 files, that proportion represents a substantial storage and governance burden — particularly for a system that charges contributing departments a per-gigabyte hosting fee under the shared-services model adopted in January 2025.

The Clean-Up Operation and What Comes Next

BRIC awarded a service contract in March 2026 to handle the deduplication work. The process involves perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually similar images even when filenames, timestamps or metadata differ — followed by human review for borderline cases. Heritage images, particularly those sourced from the Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles on the Rue des Tanneurs in the Marolles neighbourhood, require sign-off from a qualified archivist before any file is flagged for deletion or consolidation.

The target completion date for the first phase, covering Urban.Brussels and the communications departments of six central communes, is October 2026. A second phase, incorporating the Bibliothèque royale holdings and the photographic archive of Visit.Brussels, the regional tourism body, is scheduled to begin before the end of the year.

For departments that rely on these image libraries daily — including the Stadsplanning teams working on the ongoing renovation of the Midi–Lemonnier corridor and communications staff at commune level — the practical advice from BRIC is straightforward: pause any new bulk uploads to Brussels Open Data until the first-phase audit closes. New submissions should include a mandatory IPTC metadata block specifying origin institution, capture date and the commune or site depicted. Templates are available through the BRIC service desk. Getting that discipline in place now, before the second phase begins, is the only way to avoid rebuilding the same mess again by 2030.