Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Tens of thousands of duplicate images are sitting inside ACT government digital archives, costing storage budget and creating compliance headaches for agencies that must meet the territory's Territory Records Act 2002 obligations. The problem is not new, but the pressure to fix it has sharpened this financial year as the ACT Government's digital asset management review — part of the broader Digital Canberra 2025–2030 strategy — moves from audit phase into decisions about what to delete, what to migrate, and who is responsible.

The timing matters because two major procurement decisions are due before the end of August. The ACT Government's Shared Services ICT division is finalising contracts for cloud storage infrastructure that will underpin agency recordkeeping through to at least 2030. Locking in that infrastructure without resolving the duplicate image question means agencies could be paying to store redundant files for years — in some cases, the same photograph or scanned document held three or four times across separate departmental silos.

Where the Problem Lives and Why It Grew

The duplication is heaviest in agencies that digitised paper records rapidly during the 2020–2022 COVID period, when Canberra offices on London Circuit and Constitution Avenue shifted to remote workflows almost overnight. Scanning workflows at that time prioritised speed over metadata quality, meaning files often landed in multiple folders without automated deduplication checks. The Australian National University's School of Computing, which has collaborated with the ACT Government's Digital Capability unit on archival projects, flagged the metadata gap in a 2023 research paper examining government digitisation practices across three jurisdictions.

Community Services Directorate and Transport Canberra are among the agencies understood to have the largest image libraries — the latter holding visual records connected to light rail Stage 1 construction documentation and the ongoing planning work for Stage 2, which would extend the network into Belconnen. Neither directorate has publicly disclosed storage volume figures for the current financial year.

At the University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research on Kirinari Street in Bruce, archivists working on separate cultural heritage projects say the deduplication challenge is partly technical and partly institutional. The tools exist — AI-assisted image hashing and perceptual deduplication software are commercially available, with enterprise licences typically running between $40,000 and $120,000 annually depending on volume and vendor. The harder question is governance: which directorate owns the decision about what counts as a true duplicate versus a version that differs enough to warrant separate retention.

The Decisions That Will Define the Outcome

Three choices are now sitting on agency desks. First, whether to run deduplication before or after the cloud migration — doing it after is cheaper upfront but risks migrating the full bloated dataset and paying inflated cloud storage rates in the interim. Second, whether to centralise image governance under Shared Services or leave it with individual directorates; centralisation is faster but has historically met resistance from agencies protective of their own records systems. Third, how to handle images that are near-duplicates rather than exact copies — a policy call that requires human review and cannot be fully automated.

The ACT Auditor-General's Office completed a broader digital records management audit in May 2026, with findings expected to be tabled in the Legislative Assembly before the winter recess ends in late July. That report is likely to give agencies little room to delay.

For public servants in Gungahlin and Belconnen who manage local service delivery records — everything from planning permits to community program imagery — the practical advice from records managers is straightforward: do not wait for the central policy to land. Agencies that begin tagging and auditing image libraries now will be better placed when the whole-of-government framework is confirmed. The August infrastructure contract deadline is fixed. The cleanup window is not.