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

Canberra's public sector has a clutter problem it can no longer ignore. Across federal agencies headquartered in Barton, Phillip and the Parliamentary Triangle, digital asset managers are sitting on repositories bloated with duplicate images — the same photograph stored dozens of times under different file names, in different folders, by different teams. The immediate question is no longer whether to fix it, but how, and who pays.

The issue has sharpened because the Australian Public Service Commission's broader push toward shared digital infrastructure, accelerated under the Albanese government's whole-of-government data reforms, is now requiring agencies to migrate legacy content into centralised platforms. That migration process is exposing just how severe the duplication problem has become. Without a clear deduplication strategy locked in before agencies begin bulk transfers, administrators risk compounding the mess rather than resolving it.

What the Problem Looks Like on the Ground

At the Australian National University in Acton, library and research computing staff have dealt with versions of this challenge for years. ANU's institutional repository, like those of most large research organisations, accumulates duplicate image files through collaborative projects, grant reporting requirements and staff turnover. The University of Canberra's Bruce campus faces the same structural issue: researchers departing at the end of contracts rarely leave behind tidy, deduplicated archives.

For Commonwealth agencies, the stakes are higher because the imagery often carries legal and licensing conditions. An image procured under a single-use licence in 2019 and then copied across seventeen internal SharePoint folders is not just a storage problem — it is a compliance risk. The Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency has flagged content governance as a priority area within its broader whole-of-government cloud strategy, though agencies retain responsibility for their own asset audits.

Storage is not cheap. Enterprise cloud storage for large federal agencies typically runs at commercial rates that, depending on contract tier, can reach several hundred dollars per terabyte per year. An agency holding three terabytes of images when one would suffice is not just inefficient — it is burning public money. Across dozens of agencies located within the ACT, the aggregate waste is likely significant, though no single published audit has quantified the territory-wide figure.

The Decision Points Coming Before December

Three concrete decisions now sit on the table for agency chief information officers and digital asset managers.

First, whether to run automated deduplication tools before or after migration to shared platforms. Running them before is cleaner but requires resourcing now. Running them after risks locking duplicate content into a new system that is harder to unpick. The Digital Transformation Agency's own guidance, updated in early 2026, leans toward pre-migration audits, but compliance is voluntary.

Second, which deduplication standard to apply. Pixel-level matching catches identical files but misses near-duplicates — the same photo cropped slightly differently or saved at a different resolution. Perceptual hashing tools catch those cases but require more processing overhead and staff capable of reviewing flagged pairs. ANU's research computing team has piloted perceptual hashing for its own collections, a model some agencies are watching.

Third, governance: who has authority to delete. This is where most projects stall. In large departments with multiple business units, no single team wants responsibility for approving deletions that might affect another team's work. Without a clear internal policy — ideally mapped to the National Archives of Australia's records disposal frameworks — deduplication projects tend to get deprioritised when other pressures mount.

The National Archives, based on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, sets the legal floor for how government records — including images — must be managed and disposed of. Any deduplication work that touches records with ongoing administrative or historical value must comply with those disposal authorities, a step agencies sometimes skip in their haste to tidy up storage.

The practical path forward involves agencies nominating a lead digital asset officer before the end of the third quarter, commissioning a scoping audit of image repositories by September, and aligning any disposal decisions with National Archives approval processes before the December budget cycle closes. Agencies that get this sequencing right will enter 2027 with leaner, legally defensible collections. Those that don't will be back at the same table this time next year.