ACT Government's Digital Archives Push Hits a Snag: Duplicate Images Swamp the System

The ACT Digital Records Office confirmed this week that a routine audit of the territory's centralised image library had uncovered more than 14,000 duplicate photograph files across at least six government directorates, triggering an emergency review of how visual content is uploaded, stored and retrieved by public servants across Canberra.

The timing is awkward. The territory government has spent the past 18 months pushing agencies onto its unified content management platform, Territory Records Online, as part of a broader modernisation drive. Duplicate images — the same photograph filed under different names, different dates, or simply uploaded twice by separate teams — drive up storage costs, slow retrieval speeds and, in some cases, have led to the wrong version of an official image appearing in public-facing documents and websites.

What Happened This Week

The immediate trigger was a July 1 audit report circulated internally by the ACT Digital Records Office to senior information managers across Barton and Civic. The report, which has not been publicly released, flagged that the problem was concentrated in three directorates: Transport Canberra and City Services, the Health Directorate, and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate. Together, those three bodies account for roughly 9,400 of the flagged files, according to figures shared with The Daily Canberra by a source familiar with the audit's findings.

Transport Canberra's records include extensive photographic documentation of Light Rail Stage 1 construction along Flemington Road through Gungahlin, and newer imagery related to Stage 2 planning work between the city and Woden. Health Directorate files span everything from Canberra Hospital campus photos taken during the new building works on Yamba Drive in Garran to GP clinic imagery used in community health campaigns. When the same photograph exists under multiple file names, staff pulling images for reports or ministerial briefings can end up using an outdated or low-resolution version without realising it.

The ACT Library and Archives Service, based on Lawson Crescent in Acton, has been asked to provide technical assistance with deduplication protocols. The Australian National University's College of Engineering and Computer Science has also been approached to advise on automated image-matching tools, though no formal contract has been signed as of Friday.

Costs and What Comes Next

Cloud storage is not free. Territory Records Online operates on a tiered storage model, and government sources say the duplicated files are consuming an estimated 2.3 terabytes of redundant space. At current enterprise cloud rates, that translates to a recurring annual cost that agencies would rather redirect elsewhere — particularly given the ACT budget's well-documented pressure on agency operating budgets in the 2025-26 financial year.

The deduplication project is expected to run through September. Directorates have been asked to nominate a designated records officer by July 18 to coordinate with the Digital Records Office. Staff at Service ACT shopfronts in Belconnen and Tuggeranong are not directly affected by the audit, but the content management issues do touch the customer-facing image libraries those offices draw on for printed materials.

For public servants dealing with this day-to-day, the practical advice from the Digital Records Office is straightforward: before uploading any photograph to Territory Records Online, run a filename and metadata check using the platform's built-in search, and tag files with the directorate code, date and project reference number. That three-step process, which takes under two minutes, is what the audit found most teams had been skipping.

The broader lesson is one Canberra's public service has learned before with other shared platforms — adoption without consistent discipline creates problems that cost more to fix than they would have cost to prevent. The ACT Digital Records Office says it will publish updated upload guidelines on its intranet portal before the end of July.