How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — And Why It's Now a Real Problem

Somewhere in a shared drive on Constitution Avenue, the same stock photograph of Capital Hill has been saved under at least a dozen different file names. That image — or something very like it — sits duplicated across departmental SharePoint libraries, agency intranets, and communications team folders from Barton to Belconnen. It is a small example of a much larger structural problem that has been building quietly inside Canberra's public sector for the better part of a decade.

The issue of duplicate image files has moved from background noise to front-of-mind for digital records teams in 2026, driven by three converging pressures: the ACT Government's updated Digital Records Policy, which came into full effect in January, the ongoing migration of federal agency content into the whole-of-government GovTEAMS platform, and a significant increase in storage costs that have made redundant data genuinely expensive rather than merely untidy.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots of the problem run back to roughly 2016, when agencies began rapid adoption of cloud storage tools without corresponding governance frameworks. Communications units inside bodies like the Department of Finance and the National Capital Authority started accumulating image libraries pulled from multiple sources — contracted photographers, internal staff, free stock platforms, and inter-agency sharing agreements — with no consistent naming convention and no deduplication checks at the point of upload.

The University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research documented related digital archiving challenges in the ACT public sector in a 2023 working paper, noting that fragmented storage practices routinely produced redundancy rates above 30 per cent in large departmental image repositories. The Australian National University's College of Business and Economics has made similar observations about knowledge management failures in public institutions, though specific duplication figures for Canberra agencies have not been published publicly.

Each machinery-of-government change made it worse. When departments were restructured, merged, or renamed — a regular occurrence in Canberra — staff would simply copy entire image folders into new shared drives rather than audit and migrate selectively. By the time an agency like Services Australia consolidated its communications assets following its 2019 establishment, it inherited image libraries from several predecessor bodies, many containing overlapping content saved under different file names and in different formats.

The Current Reckoning

The ACT Government's Digital Records Policy, administered through the Territory Records Office in Phillip, has sharpened the focus considerably. Agencies must now demonstrate active management of digital assets, including images, as part of annual compliance reporting. For teams operating out of places like the Dickson office complex or the Ngunnawal Land Council's records unit in Gungahlin, that means practical audits that many have not conducted before.

Storage costs are a blunt motivator. Enterprise cloud storage prices for government-tier accounts have risen steadily, and duplicated image files — particularly high-resolution photography and video stills — consume disproportionate space relative to their actual utility. A single uncompressed image from a ministerial event can run to 25 megabytes; multiply that by several hundred duplicates across a department and the storage bill climbs quickly.

The GovTEAMS migration has created a natural forcing moment. Agencies moving content from legacy systems are discovering, often for the first time, exactly what they have stored and how many times they have stored it. For digital asset managers working through those migrations at agencies concentrated along the Northbourne Avenue corridor, the deduplication question is no longer theoretical.

The practical path forward involves three things that records managers and communications teams need to act on before the next compliance reporting cycle. First, establishing a single canonical image library with controlled upload permissions. Second, running automated hash-matching tools — available through the whole-of-government software panel — to identify binary duplicates before migration rather than after. Third, setting a clear retention and disposal schedule aligned with the Territory Records Act 2002 or the Commonwealth Archives Act, depending on the agency. None of it is technically complex. The hard part, as it usually is in Canberra, is getting multiple teams across multiple floors to agree to the same system before someone just creates another folder.