Prague Officials and Preservationists Clash Over Digital Copies Replacing Damaged Historic Images

Prague City Hall's ongoing effort to digitise and publicly display the municipal photo archive has hit a fault line: what to do when an original image is too damaged to restore. The answer, according to a working procedure quietly adopted by the archive unit under the Prague Institute of Planning and Development in late 2025, has been to substitute heavily degraded photographs with algorithmically reconstructed versions — a practice now drawing sharp pushback from conservators, historians and at least one member of the Prague 1 district council.

The issue surfaced publicly in June 2026 when the City of Prague Museum mounted a summer exhibition on Žižkov's pre-war street life. Several panels carried images later identified by visitors as composite reconstructions rather than authentic period photographs. The museum, located on Kožná street in the Old Town, acknowledged in a written statement that three images in the Žižkov section were produced using image-completion software trained on comparable archive material from the 1920s and 1930s. No label in the exhibition identified those images as reconstructions.

What the Experts Are Saying

Heritage professionals have been direct in their criticism. The National Heritage Institute, which holds advisory authority over publicly funded preservation projects in the Czech Republic, has said the substitution of original documents with generated imagery — even when clearly degraded — risks contaminating archival chains of evidence relied upon by urban historians, property litigants and urban planners. The institute has not issued a formal ruling but is understood to be reviewing the archive unit's procedure following a complaint filed in May 2026.

Prague's Charles University Faculty of Arts, which runs one of Central Europe's better-regarded archival studies programmes, has been more measured. Faculty staff have pointed out that the practice of producing illustrative reconstructions is not new — hand-drawn renderings have accompanied damaged photographs in published histories for generations. The real question, they argue, is one of labelling and transparency rather than the reconstruction itself. That position has found some support among officials at the Prague Institute of Planning and Development, which oversees the digitisation project and has publicly defended the process as consistent with international museum standards when properly disclosed.

The Prague 1 district council member who raised the issue at a June committee meeting cited the Žižkov exhibition specifically, arguing that if City Hall's archival work cannot be trusted to distinguish an original from a generated copy, the entire digital public archive — accessible through the Prague.eu portal and currently holding more than 140,000 catalogued images — becomes unreliable as a civic resource. The councillor called for a mandatory metadata tag on every image in the portal identifying its provenance status.

A City-Wide Audit Now Floated

The Prague Institute of Planning and Development confirmed in a written response to The Daily Prague that a technical working group is being assembled to review labelling standards across the archive. The group is expected to include representatives from the City of Prague Museum, the National Heritage Institute and the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. A preliminary set of recommendations is anticipated before the end of the third quarter of 2026.

Conservators working on the separately funded restoration of Vinohrady's historic building documentation — a project running under the auspices of the Prague 2 district office since 2023 — say the debate has direct implications for their work. That project has digitised roughly 4,200 architectural drawings and photographs related to the neighbourhood's late-19th-century apartment stock, some in severely deteriorated condition. Staff there have been using manual restoration rather than generative tools, partly in anticipation of exactly the kind of dispute now unfolding.

For ordinary Prague residents, the practical stakes are real. The municipal archive is regularly consulted by homeowners in disputes over building boundaries, façade alterations and protected status designations. If reconstructed images are indexed alongside originals without clear distinction, legal challenges based on archival evidence become significantly more complicated. The working group will need to address not just future uploads but the backlog already online — a task that, by the institute's own count, runs to several thousand images flagged as heavily degraded since the portal launched in 2019.