Canberra agencies race to fix duplicate image problem as digital records backlog mounts

ACT government agencies and several Canberra-based federal departments have this week escalated efforts to identify and replace duplicate images embedded in public-facing digital records, internal databases, and communications platforms — a problem that has quietly ballooned as agencies expanded their online presence after the pandemic-era digitisation push.

The issue matters now because the ACT Government's Digital Services Division is midway through a broader digital asset audit tied to the 2025–26 budget cycle, with a compliance deadline set for September 30, 2026. Duplicate images — the same photograph or graphic filed under multiple names across different content management systems — inflate storage costs, create version-control headaches, and in some cases have caused the wrong images to appear on ministerial and agency websites.

Where the problem is surfacing

Two agencies have been specifically flagged in internal reviews seen by The Daily Canberra: the ACT Health Directorate, which manages patient-facing content across Canberra Health Services including Canberra Hospital in Garran, and Transport Canberra, whose Light Rail and ACTION bus communications pages have carried duplicated route maps and fleet photographs for several months. Neither agency has publicly disclosed the scale of the problem.

The Australian National University's digital communications team — which operates independently of ACT government infrastructure but uses the same class of Drupal-based content management software — confirmed it identified more than 1,200 duplicate image files during a routine audit completed in June. The university began a systematic replacement program on July 1, prioritising the ANU College of Law and Research School of Earth Sciences web presences on the Acton campus. University of Canberra in Bruce is understood to be conducting a similar review, though no completion date has been announced.

For federal public servants, the issue intersects with the Australian Public Service Commission's Digital Capability Framework, which since February 2026 has required large agencies to demonstrate compliant digital asset management practices as part of workforce capability assessments. Agencies concentrated in the Barton and Parkes office precincts — home to several cabinet-level departments — are among those working to satisfy those requirements before the financial year review period closes.

What's driving the backlog

The root cause is straightforward. Between 2020 and 2023, agencies rapidly migrated content online, often importing legacy image libraries without deduplication. A single photograph of, say, Questacon on King Edward Terrace might exist under a dozen different filenames across three separate folders in a department's digital asset management system. When content editors pull images for new publications, they frequently grab whichever version appears first in search results — sometimes an outdated one, sometimes one with incorrect accessibility metadata, which itself creates compliance issues under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 standard.

Storage is a secondary but real cost. The ACT Government's whole-of-government cloud storage contract, renewed in late 2024, prices excess storage in tiers. Agencies that have not deduped their image libraries are paying for redundant files. Across a medium-sized directorate, duplicates can represent 15 to 30 percent of total image storage, according to general benchmarks published by the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency.

The practical fix involves running automated deduplication scripts against the content management system, then manually reviewing flagged files before deletion — a labour-intensive step that smaller agency teams have struggled to prioritise alongside core workloads. Several Gungahlin-based community service organisations receiving ACT government grants have reported similar backlogs in their own digital catalogues, suggesting the problem extends well beyond the city centre.

For public servants and digital communications officers managing these systems, the advice from the Digital Transformation Agency's guidance materials is consistent: run a deduplication audit before uploading new image batches, establish a single canonical folder structure, and enforce file-naming conventions at the point of upload rather than retrospectively. The September 30 deadline for the ACT audit gives agencies roughly 12 weeks to demonstrate progress — tight, but workable if remediation begins immediately rather than waiting for the next budget cycle.