By the Numbers: Tunis Municipalities Are Drowning in Duplicate Digital Images — and It's Costing Them

Tunis municipal IT departments are managing an estimated 40 to 60 percent duplication rate across their shared digital image archives — a structural problem that has quietly added tens of thousands of dinars to annual storage contracts and is now forcing a city-wide audit of how public offices handle visual records.

The issue matters right now because the Municipalité de Tunis launched a broad digital transformation push in 2024 under its Smart City initiative, pushing departments from the Médina district office to the urban planning directorate in Bab Bnet to migrate paper records into centralized cloud repositories. That migration, which was meant to cut costs, instead copied existing redundancies into new systems — sometimes tripling them.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Internal assessments reviewed by The Daily Tunis indicate that the city's shared document and image server — managed through a centralised infrastructure agreement with the state agency ANSI, the Agence Nationale de la Sécurité Informatique — contained well over 2.3 million image files as of early 2026. Of those, preliminary de-duplication scans identified that roughly 900,000 files were exact or near-exact duplicates, meaning the same photo of a building façade, a zoning map, or a heritage site was stored multiple times under different filenames or in different departmental folders.

Storage on government-contracted servers in Tunisia costs, on average, between 0.8 and 1.2 dinars per gigabyte per month depending on the contract tier — figures consistent with public procurement schedules published by the Ministry of Communication Technologies. High-resolution images from the city's architectural survey of the Médina, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, can run between 8 and 25 megabytes each. Multiply that across hundreds of thousands of duplicates, and the monthly overhead becomes substantial before a single new photograph is added.

The duplication problem is not uniform. The Direction de l'Urbanisme, headquartered near Avenue Habib Bourguiba, and the Bureau de la Médina, which coordinates heritage preservation along Rue de la Kasbah, were identified in the audit scope as two of the heaviest contributors to the backlog. Both offices have historically operated independent image libraries with little synchronisation between them, meaning the same survey photograph could legitimately end up saved by four separate staff members on four separate dates.

What a Fix Actually Requires — and What It Costs

De-duplication is not simply a matter of running a piece of software overnight. Automated tools flag suspected duplicates, but human review is still required before any file is deleted from a public record — particularly when those files relate to legally significant planning decisions or heritage documentation. IT specialists familiar with public-sector rollouts in North Africa estimate that a supervised de-duplication project of this scale typically requires between three and six months of dedicated staffing and a licensed software deployment that can range from 15,000 to 50,000 dinars depending on the vendor and volume.

There is a further complication. Some duplicates exist because different departments need working copies of the same image for different purposes — one for print, one compressed for web, one archived at original resolution. Collapsing all three into a single file without a proper asset management system simply recreates the chaos in a different form. The audit is therefore pushing toward the adoption of a Digital Asset Management platform, a step that several regional capitals including Casablanca and Amman have taken in recent years to standardise how municipal image libraries are structured.

The practical implications for residents and contractors are real. Delays in accessing verified site photographs have pushed back permit processing at the commune level in at least three neighbourhoods — including La Marsa and Bab El Khadra — where urban renewal applications require archived photographic evidence of prior construction states. For applicants waiting on those decisions, the data mess translates directly into weeks of additional waiting time.

The Municipalité de Tunis has not yet set a public deadline for completing the audit or deploying a permanent solution. But the Smart City office has indicated — through its published 2026 work programme — that digital infrastructure rationalisation is a priority for the second half of this year. How fast the review moves will depend largely on budget allocation decisions expected at the next municipal council session, scheduled for later this month.