How Rio's Street-Art Archive Became a Battlefield Over Duplicate Images — and How We Got Here

Rio de Janeiro's municipal archive has spent the better part of three years trying to untangle a problem that sounds deceptively simple: the same photographs, sometimes hundreds of them, appear multiple times across the city's official digital catalogues, displacing original and historically significant images and making coherent searches nearly impossible. The issue, known inside the Instituto Pereira Passos — the city's official urban research and planning body — as the "imagem duplicada" crisis, has now drawn attention from municipal councillors on the Câmara Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, who raised the matter formally during a June 2026 public session.

The stakes are higher than they might appear. Rio's visual public record underpins everything from planning decisions in Madureira to heritage-protection arguments in the historic centre around the Praça XV de Novembro. When duplicate images flood a catalogue, authentic records get buried, misattributed or quietly deleted to make storage room. What begins as a data-management headache ends as a gap in collective memory.

How the Problem Built Up

The roots go back to at least 2018, when the city accelerated the digitisation of its photographic collections under a programme tied to the broader Arquivo Geral da Cidade, which holds records stretching back to the colonial period. The digitisation push was well-intentioned: Rio had lost physical documents to flooding in the past, most damagingly in the low-lying warehouses near the Porto Maravilha waterfront redevelopment zone. Moving everything online seemed the obvious safeguard.

The trouble came with the tools. Multiple teams, working independently across different secretariats, uploaded the same batches of images without a shared deduplication protocol. The Secretaria Municipal de Cultura ran its own upload pipeline. So did the urban-planning arm housed at the Instituto Pereira Passos headquarters on Rua Heitor Beltrão in Tijuca. By the time anyone compared catalogues, the same photograph of, say, the Escadaria Selarón in Santa Teresa might exist under four different file names, three different date attributions, and two different credited photographers — or none at all.

A 2023 internal audit, the results of which were reported by the local technology-and-governance outlet Rio On Watch at the time, found that duplicate entries accounted for a significant share of the searchable database. The problem was compounded by the city's reliance on at least two separate content-management platforms that did not talk to each other, according to documentation reviewed by this newspaper. Procurement records available through the city's transparency portal show that one legacy platform contract, signed in 2019, was still being extended as recently as late 2024.

What the City Is Now Trying to Do

Since early 2025, the Instituto Pereira Passos has been piloting an automated image-matching tool across a subset of its Zona Norte neighbourhood photography collections, starting with holdings related to Madureira and Méier. The pilot is meant to flag probable duplicates for human review rather than deleting them automatically — a lesson learned from an earlier episode in which a batch of 1970s Carnival photographs from the Sambódromo's predecessor site on Rua Marquês de Sapucaí were incorrectly marked as duplicates and temporarily removed from public access.

The Câmara Municipal session in June produced a non-binding recommendation that the city adopt a single unified metadata standard before the end of 2026, modelled loosely on protocols used by the Biblioteca Nacional on Avenida Rio Branco, which manages its own large digitised collection. Whether the secretariats will agree on a shared standard by that deadline is an open question given the history of siloed working.

For residents and researchers who rely on these archives — historians writing about Lapa, journalists documenting Rocinha's infrastructure changes, students at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro pulling images for urban-studies theses — the practical advice right now is to cross-reference anything pulled from the municipal digital catalogue against the Biblioteca Nacional's holdings or the physical collections at the Arquivo Geral on Rua Amoroso Lima in the port zone. The digital record, until the deduplication work is complete, remains unreliable in ways that are not always obvious to a casual user.