Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Cities Cleaning Up Their Digital Archives

Canberra's public sector holds one of the most image-heavy digital archives in the southern hemisphere, and a growing share of it is duplicated, outdated or simply redundant. A push to tackle the problem — known in records-management circles as duplicate image replacement — is now underway across several ACT government directorates, with the process touching everything from Service ACT's Dickson shopfront photography to planning imagery stored by the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate for the Gungahlin corridor.

The timing is not accidental. Federal agencies and territory bodies have been under pressure since the National Archives of Australia updated its digital records disposal guidance in late 2024, which tightened the rules around retaining multiple versions of the same image file across separate systems. For a city where the public service workforce dominates the economy and every directorate runs its own content management system, the administrative drag from duplicate assets is measurable in both storage costs and staff hours.

What Other Cities Are Doing

Amsterdam, Wellington and Edinburgh — all comparable in population scale to Canberra and similarly dependent on government as an economic anchor — have each moved to centralised digital asset management platforms in the past three years. Wellington City Council consolidated its image libraries onto a single platform in 2023, cutting reported storage redundancy by roughly 40 percent across its communications and planning departments. Edinburgh's approach, rolled out through its Smart City programme, went further, using automated deduplication tools to flag near-identical images captured at different resolutions or under different filenames before a human archivist makes a final call.

Canberra has not yet committed to a single platform approach at the territory level. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, which runs through to 2025 and has been under review for renewal, nominates interoperability and data efficiency as priorities, but duplicate image replacement is not named explicitly as a target. Individual directorates are managing the problem differently — some using Microsoft SharePoint's built-in deduplication alerts, others relying on manual audits conducted quarterly.

At the Australian National University, the Scholarly Communication team has been dealing with a related but distinct version of the problem: duplicate images appearing across research data repositories, which carries implications for academic integrity as well as storage. ANU's library services updated its research data management policy in 2025 to require researchers to run deduplication checks before lodging visual datasets. The University of Canberra has a comparable process embedded in its digital media archive guidelines.

The Local Cost and the Path Forward

Storage is not cheap. Enterprise cloud storage for ACT government bodies, procured through whole-of-government arrangements, carries per-gigabyte costs that, across hundreds of directorates and agencies, add up quickly. Industry benchmarks suggest duplicate files typically account for between 20 and 30 percent of total storage in large public sector environments — a figure that translates into real budget pressure when applied to territory-scale operations.

The practical advice circulating among ACT records managers at the moment points in a consistent direction: audit before you consolidate. Several directorates that attempted a platform migration without first running a deduplication pass found themselves carrying the same redundant images into the new environment, negating much of the efficiency gain. The better practice, as demonstrated in Wellington and now being discussed in forums run by the ACT's Chief Digital Officer area, is to establish a canonical image — the definitive version — and retire all others before any migration begins.

For Canberrans outside the public service, the issue surfaces in unexpected places. The ACT Government's engagement platform, Your Say Canberra, relies on image assets to illustrate consultation projects from Belconnen town centre redevelopments to light rail stage 2 corridor planning. Duplicate or low-quality images on that platform have drawn criticism in public submissions, with community groups pointing to inconsistent visuals as a sign of rushed consultation processes. Cleaning up the image libraries that feed platforms like that one is, in the end, not just a technical exercise — it affects how clearly the government communicates with the people who live here.