Buenos Aires Rushes to Fix Decades of Corrupted Digital Archives

The city government of Buenos Aires quietly acknowledged earlier this year that its official digital image repository, used by agencies ranging from the Instituto Ciudad to the Secretaría de Cultura, contains thousands of duplicate, mislabelled, or low-resolution files accumulated since at least 2014. The problem is not cosmetic. Duplicated images in public-facing portals slow load times, inflate storage costs, and, in several documented cases flagged by municipal archivists, have led to the wrong photographs appearing alongside official urban planning documents in the Microcentro redevelopment zone.

The issue has sharpened under the Milei administration's sweeping austerity programme, which has forced municipal and national agencies to justify every line of IT spending. With the peso broadly stabilised under IMF programme conditions and dollarisation remaining a live debate, procurement decisions that once passed unremarked, including storage expansion contracts, now face scrutiny. Cleaning up a legacy database rather than paying to expand it has become, in effect, the fiscally responsible option.

What Buenos Aires Is Doing, and What It Isn't

The city's primary response has been the rollout of a deduplication protocol under the Archivo General porteño, headquartered on Diagonal Sur in the Monserrat neighbourhood. The programme, which archivists began piloting in March 2026, uses open-source software to flag image pairs with above a 90-percent similarity threshold for human review before deletion. Staff at the Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno on Agüero 2502, in Recoleta, are running a parallel effort on their own digital collections, covering roughly 180,000 scanned items dating back to a 2009 digitisation drive.

The pace is slow. Municipal sources familiar with the project, speaking without authorisation to discuss internal targets, indicate the Archivo General has cleared fewer than 12,000 files since March, a fraction of the estimated 340,000 flagged duplicates in the system. Budget constraints mean the work is being done by existing staff rather than dedicated contractors, and the Secretaría de Gestión e Innovación has not publicly committed to a completion date.

Compare that to São Paulo, where the Prefeitura concluded a 14-month image-deduplication project across its GeoSampa urban data platform in late 2025, processing more than 2.1 million georeferenced files using a combination of automated hashing and a small contracted team. Mexico City's government, through its Agencia Digital de Innovación Pública, began a similar exercise in 2023 and had reduced its municipal image catalogue by an estimated 28 percent within eighteen months, according to the agency's own published transparency reports. Buenos Aires, by contrast, has no published metrics and no formal public timeline.

Why the Gap Exists, and What It Costs

The disparity is partly structural. São Paulo and Mexico City both invested in centralised data governance frameworks in the early 2020s, creating single points of accountability for digital asset management. Buenos Aires fragmented its digital holdings across multiple secretariats, which each accumulated their own image libraries with inconsistent naming conventions. A 2022 audit commissioned by the then-Secretaría de Modernización estimated the annual cost of storing redundant data across city systems at approximately 1.4 million pesos at the time, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, would be vastly higher today.

The cultural sector has felt it acutely. Institutions in Palermo Soho, including several independent galleries that rely on the city's public image licensing portal for promotional materials, have reported receiving duplicate or watermark-conflicted files when requesting official imagery for events. The portal, launched under a 2019 smart-city initiative, has not been significantly updated since.

For organisations navigating this now, the practical advice from archivists is straightforward: do not wait for the municipal system to catch up. The Biblioteca Nacional's digitisation team has published a step-by-step deduplication guide on its institutional website, aimed at smaller cultural institutions lacking IT departments. Several community archives in La Boca and San Telmo have already adopted it. The city's own cleanup will continue, but for anyone depending on clean, reliable image data before 2027, building internal processes is the only certain path.