Tunis Pushes to Clear Thousands of Duplicate Images From City's Digital Archives This Week

The Municipality of Tunis confirmed this week that it has entered the operational phase of a multi-month project to identify and remove duplicate digital images clogging its central records system — a backlog that officials say has slowed permit processing, confused urban planning reviews, and inflated storage costs across at least four city directorates since 2023.

The timing matters. Tunis is mid-way through a broader e-governance push tied to the national Digital Tunisia 2025–2030 strategy, and bloated, redundant data archives have repeatedly been flagged by internal auditors as a practical obstacle to faster service delivery. With the city's Agence de Mise en Valeur du Patrimoine et de Promotion Culturelle (AMVPPC) also digitising thousands of heritage-site photographs from medina districts including Halfaouine and Bab Souika, the risk of duplication compounds weekly.

What Happened This Week

On Tuesday, July 1, the municipality's Direction des Systèmes d'Information began deploying automated deduplication software across shared drives linked to the Direction de l'Urbanisme, which handles building permits for neighbourhoods stretching from Lafayette to Lac II. Staff at the Bureau de l'Habitat in Avenue Habib Bourguiba were briefed on the new workflow on Wednesday morning. The rollout is expected to cover roughly 40 terabytes of archived material by the end of July.

The core problem is mundane but costly. Over several years, department staff scanning property maps, architectural drawings, and site inspection photographs repeatedly uploaded the same files to multiple folders without a systematic check. One internal review, completed in late 2025 and circulated to directorate heads, found that in some project folders related to the Grand Tunis urban extension plans, duplicate files accounted for more than 30 percent of total stored images. That figure has not been officially published, but it shaped the decision to act before further digitisation contracts are signed.

The AMVPPC faces a parallel version of the same challenge. Its ongoing effort to photograph and catalogue listed buildings in the medina — the UNESCO-recognised historic core bounded roughly by Bab el-Bhar to the east and the Zitouna Mosque at its centre — has generated tens of thousands of images since 2022. Without deduplication protocols, heritage staff risk storing multiple near-identical photographs of the same archway or tile panel, wasting both storage and cataloguing labour.

What This Means for Residents and Businesses

For residents dealing with the municipality, the practical effect should eventually be shorter wait times on file retrievals. Property owners in Menzah and El Menzah VI who have submitted renovation permit applications in the past year have sometimes been told their files could not be located promptly — a problem officials now trace partly to disorganised, duplicated image sets that complicate search functions in the city's document management platform.

The storage costs are real. Cloud and on-premises data storage for the municipality's administrative network runs to several hundred thousand dinars annually, according to budget documents tabled before the Municipal Council in March 2026. Eliminating redundant files is expected to reduce that load by a meaningful margin, though the directorate has not published a specific savings target.

Businesses applying for commercial licences at the Maison de l'Entreprise on Rue Ibn Khaldoun are among those most likely to notice faster turnaround, since their applications often require cross-referencing urban zoning maps that live in the same image archives now being cleaned.

The deduplication project is scheduled to complete its first audit report by September 15, 2026, at which point the Direction des Systèmes d'Information will present findings to the Municipal Council. Residents with pending permit or planning applications are advised to contact their relevant directorate directly if they have not received an update in more than 30 days — the municipality's general information line on Rue de la Commission operates Sunday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.