How Prague's Public Image Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicates — and What the City Is Doing About It

Prague City Hall has confirmed it is undertaking a systematic review of its visual media archives after auditors found widespread duplication of images across at least three separate municipal content platforms. The cleanup effort, which began in the spring of 2026, targets tens of thousands of redundant files that have slowed internal workflows and complicated public communications for city departments ranging from urban planning to tourism promotion.

The issue matters now because Prague is mid-way through a broader digital infrastructure overhaul tied to its Smart Prague 2030 strategy, a programme approved by the Prague City Council that aims to modernise data management across all municipal offices. Duplicated image assets sitting in disconnected silos are not just a storage problem — they create legal and licensing headaches when the same photograph, acquired under different contracts at different times, ends up used by multiple offices without clear provenance tracking.

How the Pile-Up Happened

The roots of the problem trace back at least a decade. Prague's tourism arm, Prague City Tourism, maintained its own image library. The Institute of Planning and Development — based on Vyšehradská street in Nusle — kept a separate archive for urban documentation. The Prague Media Centre, which handles communications for the mayor's office, operated a third repository. None of these systems were integrated. Photographers hired for one project might deliver files to all three offices independently, and each office would catalogue them separately, sometimes under different file names.

Between 2018 and 2023, the city contracted for digital content under at least four separate procurement rounds, according to public procurement records held on the Prague City Hall website. Each round produced new batches of images that were delivered into whichever departmental inbox commissioned the work. The absence of a unified metadata standard meant that by 2025, automated deduplication tools flagged an internal estimate of roughly 34 percent overlap across the three main archives — though city officials have not confirmed that figure publicly.

The problem was compounded by the 2020-2022 period, when the Covid-19 pandemic pushed nearly all municipal communications online. Demand for digital imagery surged while in-person coordination between departments collapsed. Offices ordered what they needed independently, accelerating the duplication rate. Nové Město district offices, for example, ordered separate sets of Wenceslas Square photographs for neighbourhood-level communication campaigns that overlapped substantially with imagery already held centrally by Prague City Tourism.

The Fix — and the Frustration

The current review is being coordinated through the Prague Digital Agency, established in 2021 under the city's smart city framework. The agency is piloting a centralised Digital Asset Management system that uses hash-based fingerprinting to identify identical or near-identical images regardless of file name or storage location. Departments located from Letná to the Smíchov municipal hub are being brought onto the system in phases, with the first phase covering planning and tourism archives set for completion by the end of the third quarter of 2026.

The practical stakes are real. Storage costs for municipal servers are not trivial, and licensing complications have already delayed at least one public communications campaign, according to the city's own digital audit summary published in March 2026. Under Czech copyright law, using a photograph without confirmed licensing rights — even accidentally, because a department assumed another office had cleared the rights — can expose the city to civil liability.

For Praguers watching city budgets, the lesson is straightforward: fragmented procurement and siloed IT systems generate costs that extend well beyond the original contracts. The consolidation effort is estimated to take until mid-2027 to complete across all departments. Residents or journalists seeking images from municipal archives are advised to submit requests through the unified Prague City Tourism media portal at this point, as the legacy departmental libraries are being progressively frozen pending the migration. Those working with older downloaded files should verify licensing status directly with the Prague Digital Agency before republication.