Duplicate Images Are Costing ACT Government Agencies Thousands — Here's What the Experts Are Saying

ACT government agencies and federal departments headquartered in Canberra are sitting on enormous stockpiles of duplicate digital images — redundant files that inflate cloud storage bills, slow down internal systems and create genuine legal headaches under the Archives Act 1983. The problem, specialists say, is no longer a minor housekeeping issue. It is a structural one, and pressure is building to fix it.

The timing matters. With federal agencies across Russell, Barton and Civic mid-way through multi-year digital transformation programs, records managers are confronting a contradiction: governments are digitising more material than ever, yet the underlying file hygiene that makes digitisation useful has lagged badly. Duplicate images — the same photograph, scan or graphic stored multiple times under different filenames across different folders and platforms — sit at the centre of that contradiction.

What Specialists and Agency Managers Are Raising

Technology and information management professionals working with ACT public sector bodies have pointed to several overlapping causes. Shared drives on the ACT Government's Canberra Connect infrastructure, combined with migration projects that moved legacy files to Microsoft 365 environments without deduplication checks, have left agencies with replicated assets running into the tens of thousands of files in some cases. The Australian National University's digital humanities unit, which advises on archival methodology, has flagged that poorly deduplicated image libraries compromise the integrity of metadata — making files harder to search, attribute or dispose of in line with National Archives of Australia disposal authorities.

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, released last year, sets a target for agencies to achieve structured data governance by mid-2027. Records and information professionals across the public service say duplicate image management is one of the least addressed items under that framework. For agencies in Gungahlin, where newer suburban offices house growing public-facing teams with high volumes of community engagement photography, the problem is particularly acute.

Independent digital asset consultants who work with Commonwealth entities near the Parliamentary Triangle estimate that a mid-sized agency managing roughly 500,000 image files could be paying between $18,000 and $40,000 per year in unnecessary cloud storage costs attributable to duplicate files alone, depending on the platform and storage tier. Those figures are not official government numbers, but they reflect industry benchmarks for organisations of comparable size.

Practical Pathways Being Discussed

The conversation in Canberra's public sector is moving, slowly, toward automated deduplication tooling. Platforms with hash-based file comparison — which identify identical or near-identical images regardless of filename — have been trialled by at least one agency within the Department of Finance's property and publishing functions, according to procurement records published on AusTender. The University of Canberra's Faculty of Science and Technology has also incorporated duplicate image detection into coursework for its digital records management stream, reflecting demand from students heading into the public service.

The National Archives of Australia, based on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, sets the compliance floor for federal agencies through its Check-up Digital program, which assesses digital information management maturity. Agencies that score poorly on information asset registers — a category where duplicate images directly affect accuracy — face additional scrutiny in subsequent assessments. The 2025 assessment round found a meaningful share of agencies still rated at the two lowest maturity tiers for digital information management, though the Archives has not published a breakdown by specific failure category.

For ACT government bodies, the relevant framework sits with the Territory Records Office, which administers the Territory Records Act 2002. Practitioners say that office has increased its guidance activity around digital asset registers over the past 18 months, including workshops run out of the Nara Centre in Mitchell.

The practical advice circulating among records managers is direct: agencies should run a baseline audit before migrating any further image libraries to new platforms, use hash-comparison tools rather than relying on filename or date-stamp checks, and build deduplication into procurement contracts for any new digital asset management system. Delaying those steps, the argument goes, only compounds the cost and compliance exposure later — particularly as the ACT Government's light rail stage 2 construction photographs, community consultation images and planning records continue to accumulate at pace.