Canberra's duplicate image problem: what officials, experts and key figures are saying

Duplicate images buried inside government databases and digital archives cost agencies real money, slow down records management, and — in at least one documented case involving the ACT Government's ServicesCanberra portal — have caused public-facing documents to display incorrect or outdated photographs alongside current information. The problem is neither trivial nor new, but pressure to fix it has intensified as federal agencies based in Canberra's Parliamentary Triangle shift toward cloud-based records systems ahead of a whole-of-government digital transition scheduled for late 2026.

The timing matters. The Australian Public Service Commission has been pushing departments to audit their digital asset libraries as part of broader data hygiene requirements linked to the Australian Government Architecture framework. For the ACT, which runs its own parallel records infrastructure through the ACT Archives and Territory Records Office on Morshead Drive in Greenway, the duplication issue sits at the intersection of cost, compliance, and public trust. Storage is not free — commercial cloud tiers used by mid-size agencies typically run between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month, and image files, particularly high-resolution scans of planning documents and heritage records, accumulate fast.

Who is talking, and what are they saying

Nobody at the Territory Records Office agreed to speak on the record for this story by deadline, but the office's published guidance — updated in March 2026 — explicitly flags duplicate digital assets as a disposal risk under the Territory Records Act 2002. The guidance instructs agencies to identify and schedule duplicate records before migration to new systems, warning that retaining unnecessary copies creates legal exposure if the wrong version of a document is retrieved in response to a freedom-of-information request.

At the Australian National University's School of Computing, researchers working on the university's digital preservation projects have spent the past two years developing hash-based detection tools designed to flag near-duplicate images — photographs that are functionally identical but differ slightly because of compression, cropping, or metadata changes. The problem those tools are designed to solve is common inside large institutions: the same image saved a dozen times across different folders, often renamed, occasionally altered. ANU has not published findings specific to ACT government datasets, but the methodology is directly applicable.

The University of Canberra's Faculty of Arts and Design runs a digital records practicum that places students inside ACT government agencies each semester. Practitioners from that program have described — in published course reflections available on the UC website — encountering image libraries where duplication rates above 30 per cent were not unusual in older shared drives. That figure aligns with industry benchmarks cited by the Digital Preservation Coalition, a UK-based body whose guidance is widely referenced by Australian archivists.

What agencies should do next

The practical advice circulating among records managers in Civic and Barton is straightforward, if unglamorous. First, run a deduplication audit before any cloud migration — not after. Second, establish a single source-of-truth repository for official images, particularly those used in public communications, planning documents, and the kinds of infrastructure reports that accompany projects like the Light Rail Stage 2 corridor through Flemington Road and into Gungahlin. Third, document which version of an image is the authoritative one and why, so that future FOI responses pull the right file.

The ACT Auditor-General's Office, which operates out of Level 4 on 14 Childers Street in the city, has not announced a specific inquiry into digital asset management. But its 2025 annual report flagged records governance broadly as an area warranting closer attention across multiple directorates. That signal has not gone unnoticed inside agencies already anxious about the 2026 transition deadlines.

For public servants in Belconnen and Gungahlin who interact daily with shared image libraries and document management systems, the immediate step is mundane but important: check whether your agency has a current records disposal authority that covers digital images. If it does not, the Territory Records Office can issue one. If it does, the audit has to happen regardless. The duplicate image problem does not fix itself, and every month of delay makes the migration harder.