ACT Government's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happened This Week

The ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions division confirmed this week it is reviewing duplicate image files embedded across more than 40 agency websites, after an internal content audit flagged the problem as a growing liability for storage costs and accessibility compliance. The review, which began in earnest on July 1, covers platforms administered from Canberra's civic precinct and extends to outward-facing services used daily by residents from Gungahlin to Tuggeranong.

The timing is not accidental. The ACT Government is midway through a broader digital modernisation push tied to its whole-of-government ICT strategy, and auditors have been pressing agencies to clean up legacy content before a planned migration to a new content management platform. Duplicate images — photographs stored multiple times under different file names, often uploaded by separate teams without coordination — inflate storage costs, slow page load times, and can create accessibility headaches when alt-text descriptions are inconsistent across copies of the same file.

Where the Problem Showed Up

The audit focused first on two high-traffic properties: the Access Canberra service portal, which handles everything from vehicle registrations to development applications, and the Canberra Health Services public information site, which serves patients across the Canberra Hospital campus on Yamba Drive in Garran and the Calverton Park-adjacent facilities in Belconnen. Both sites were identified as carrying significant volumes of redundant image assets, some dating to website rebuilds carried out before 2020.

The Australian National University's digital communications team, which operates independently of ACT Government infrastructure but shares some vendor contracts for image licensing, flagged a parallel issue on its own platforms in late June. ANU confirmed it is conducting its own internal review, though that process sits outside the territory government's audit scope. The University of Canberra, based on Kirinari Street in Bruce, is understood to be watching the ACT Government process before deciding whether to align its own content review calendar.

Duplicate image replacement sounds like a dry infrastructure task, but the downstream effects are real for Canberrans who rely on government websites. Slow-loading pages disproportionately affect residents in outer growth suburbs like Taylor and Molonglo, where NBN connection quality remains more variable than in the inner north. The ACT's Digital Inclusion Action Plan, adopted in 2023, explicitly commits the government to optimising page performance for lower-bandwidth users.

What Happens From Here

The remediation work is being staged across the July-September quarter. Agencies have until August 15 to submit a register of duplicate assets to DDTS for centralised deduplication. After that, a compressed image library — standardised file names, mandatory alt-text fields, and a single source of truth for frequently used photography — will be pushed to participating agency sites before the end of the financial quarter.

The project is drawing on lessons from a similar exercise completed by the New South Wales Government's Department of Customer Service in 2024, which reported a reduction in total web asset storage of roughly 34 percent after a comparable deduplication exercise across Service NSW's digital properties. The ACT's own targets have not been publicly released, but the scope of the review — 40-plus sites, some carrying image libraries built up over more than a decade — suggests the storage savings could be substantial.

For public servants working in the Russell offices or the Hume-based logistics agencies, the practical upshot is a temporary content freeze on image uploads to affected platforms while the audit runs. Communications teams have been told to submit new photography through a centralised request process rather than uploading directly. The freeze is expected to lift progressively from late July as agencies receive clearance.

Residents who notice broken images or slow-loading pages on ACT Government sites during the audit period are encouraged to report them through the Access Canberra feedback tool, which remains operational throughout the review.