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Santiago Municipality Removes Thousands of Duplicate Photos From Property Records
A citywide audit of duplicated cadastral photographs has forced the Municipalidad de Santiago to suspend online permit searches for parts of this week while engineers clean corrupted database entries.
How we reported this
The Municipalidad de Santiago confirmed Thursday that a technical audit launched June 30 had identified more than 14,000 duplicate image files embedded in the Sistema de Información Territorial, the digital platform residents and notaries use to pull property permits and cadastral records for addresses across the commune. The duplicates, many of them scanned photographs of façades in Barrio Yungay and Barrio Italia uploaded twice during a 2023 digitisation sprint, were triggering error loops that slowed document retrieval to a crawl during peak morning hours.
The timing matters. Chile's Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales has been pushing all 346 communes to migrate legacy paper records onto interoperable digital platforms before December 31, 2026, a deadline tied to the implementation of the Ley de Transformación Digital del Estado. Santiago's commune, which processes roughly 900 permit requests per week according to internal figures cited by the municipality's own press bulletin, cannot afford a prolonged outage as mid-year construction activity picks up and developers file paperwork for projects along Avenida Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins.
What the Duplication Problem Actually Looks Like
The root cause, according to the municipality's published technical notice dated July 1, was a batch import script that ran twice during a server migration in October 2023. Each affected property record ended up carrying two identical JPEG files, sometimes three, tagged with the same metadata. The system struggled to distinguish originals from copies, so search queries returned bloated result sets and, in roughly 340 cases, displayed the wrong façade photograph against the correct address. Notaries working out of offices on Calle Morandé and along Paseo Bulnes flagged the mismatches in May after clients received permit printouts showing a building on a different block.
The Archivo Patrimonial de Santiago, housed inside the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral on Avenida Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins 227, has been cross-referencing its own photographic holdings to help verify which image belongs to which property parcel. Archivists there hold physical reference photographs dating to the 1980s urban survey, giving engineers a ground-truth set to compare against the corrupted digital entries.
Parallel to that manual verification work, the municipality contracted Empresa Nacional de Computación e Informática, a state-linked technology firm, to run a deduplication algorithm across the full image repository. The contract, published on the Mercado Público platform under order No. 2026-7734-CM on July 2, is valued at $48.6 million Chilean pesos and must be completed within 21 calendar days.
Residents and Notaries Feel the Slowdown
Practical disruption has been uneven. The online portal at munistgo.cl suspended property-image queries for addresses in the postcodes corresponding to the Barrio Yungay sector, roughly between Calle Compañía de Jesús and Calle Catedral, west of the Plaza de Armas, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. on both Tuesday and Wednesday this week. Residents needing certified cadastral prints during those windows had to visit the Departamento de Obras in person at Calle Bandera 52, where queue times stretched past 45 minutes on Wednesday morning.
The disruption lands at a sensitive moment for housing policy in Santiago. The Boric administration's Plan de Emergencia Habitacional has been trying to accelerate social housing approvals in central communes, and any slowdown in the permit-processing chain directly delays project timelines for social housing cooperatives operating in the Barrio Franklin and Barrio Meiggs areas.
The municipality says the deduplication work will be completed by July 23, after which the full portal should return to normal operation. Property owners who need certified image records before that date can request a manual verification appointment through the municipality's Mesa de Partes digital system, or visit Bandera 52 in person, weekdays between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. The Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales has said it is monitoring the situation but has not indicated it will extend the December 2026 migration deadline for any commune.