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

Thousands of duplicate digital images are clogging the asset management systems of ACT government agencies, costing storage budgets and slowing down procurement and communications workflows across the territory. The problem has quietly accumulated over more than a decade of siloed departmental IT infrastructure, and officials are now facing a hard deadline to sort it out.

The pressure is real and immediate. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, which set targets for consolidating agency data holdings, flags the end of the 2025–26 financial year — that is, right now — as a review point for digital asset standardisation across the public service. Agencies that have not begun auditing duplicate holdings risk losing priority access to the shared cloud storage arrangements being negotiated through Shared Services, the territory's central ICT procurement body based on London Circuit in Civic.

Why This Matters to Canberra's Public Service

Canberra's economy is uniquely exposed to inefficiencies in government digital infrastructure. The ACT public service employs roughly 23,000 people, and a significant share of those roles involve content creation, communications, or policy work that depends daily on image libraries and digital asset management platforms. When duplicate files accumulate unchecked, the practical consequences range from staff wasting hours searching for the correct version of an approved photograph to agencies accidentally publishing outdated or unconsented imagery.

The Australian National University's digital collections team in Acton has faced a version of this problem independently. The university's library services have been running a deduplication project across its institutional repository since early 2025, targeting an estimated 40,000 duplicate image files across research and archival collections. A university spokesperson's office confirmed the project is ongoing but declined to provide a completion date. ANU is not bound by ACT Government procurement rules, but its approach is being watched closely by University of Canberra staff in Bruce, who are assessing whether a similar internal audit is warranted.

For ACT agencies, the Shared Services pathway looks like the most likely route forward. Under the model being discussed, agencies would migrate image libraries onto a centralised platform — likely an extension of the Microsoft 365 environment already in use across directorates — with automated deduplication tools running at the point of upload. The ACT Government's 2025–26 Budget allocated $4.2 million to digital modernisation across Shared Services, though that envelope covers a range of initiatives beyond image management alone.

The Decisions That Will Define the Outcome

Three choices will determine whether this cleanup actually happens or stalls in committee. First, agencies need to decide whether to use automated deduplication software or conduct manual audits. Automated tools are faster and cheaper per file but carry a real risk of deleting images that look identical but carry different metadata, rights clearances, or version histories. Manual review is defensible but slow — and in a public service already stretched by back-office cuts, the staffing hours are hard to find.

Second, there is the question of who owns the outcome. Currently, each directorate manages its own digital assets with minimal central oversight. The Communications Cluster, which sits within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate on London Circuit, has been flagged as the natural home for a whole-of-government image governance policy. Whether that directorate takes on the coordination role — or whether it gets assigned to Shared Services — is still unresolved as of this week.

Third, agencies must decide what to do with images that cannot be clearly attributed or rights-cleared. Deleting them carries legal risk if they were used in published materials. Retaining them perpetuates the clutter. Some agencies are leaning toward a quarantine folder approach, sequestering ambiguous files rather than destroying them.

The practical next step for anyone working in an ACT agency or a Canberra institution: check whether your directorate has received guidance from Shared Services on the audit timeline. If not, the review period that opened on July 1 is the moment to raise it with a digital lead. The decisions being made in the next few weeks will shape how Canberra's government manages its visual identity for years to come.