Canberra's Digital Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — and the Numbers Tell a Costly Story

Across Canberra's sprawl of federal and territory agencies, a quiet storage crisis has been building for years. Duplicate image files — the same photograph saved three, five, sometimes a dozen times under different filenames — now account for an estimated 30 to 40 percent of total digital asset storage in mid-sized government and institutional libraries, according to digital asset management industry benchmarking published by the Association for Information and Image Management in 2025. For a city where public sector IT budgets are perpetually under the microscope, that redundancy translates directly into wasted dollars.

The timing matters. The ACT Government's whole-of-government digital storage contract, managed through Shared Services ICT based on Callam Street in Woden, is up for renegotiation in late 2026. Agencies submitting storage forecasts over the past three months have been asked, for the first time, to include duplicate-file audits as part of their data hygiene reporting. The directive signals a shift: storage is no longer treated as an infinitely cheap commodity.

The Scale of the Problem in the ACT

The numbers stack up fast. Enterprise cloud storage pricing for Australian government clients on whole-of-government panel arrangements typically runs between $0.023 and $0.038 per gigabyte per month for warm-tier storage — meaning agencies storing a redundant terabyte of image data are spending roughly $276 to $456 per year on files that, by definition, already exist elsewhere in the same system. Multiply that across the ACT's 30-plus directorates and statutory bodies and the figure becomes significant quickly.

The Australian National University, whose Acton campus hosts one of the country's largest institutional photograph collections — spanning research, events, and campus documentation going back decades — began a duplicate-image remediation program in early 2025 using automated perceptual hashing tools. Perceptual hashing identifies visually identical or near-identical images even when file names, formats, or metadata differ. The University of Canberra's library and digital collections team in Bruce is understood to be examining a similar approach, though no formal program has been publicly announced.

For context: a single high-resolution image shot on a modern mirrorless camera runs to 25–50 megabytes in RAW format. A communications team that saves the same file to a shared drive, a project folder, an email attachment, and a web content management system has already quadrupled its storage footprint before a single duplicate is created through accidental re-upload. In departments that run major public consultations — Transport Canberra's Light Rail Stage 2 community engagement series being a recent example — image libraries can swell by thousands of files across a six-month period.

What Deduplication Actually Delivers

Industry data offers a concrete benchmark. Organisations that run structured duplicate-image replacement and deduplication programs typically recover between 20 and 35 percent of their active image storage within the first audit cycle, according to figures published by Gartner in its 2024 Digital Asset Management market guide. For a territory agency sitting on 10 terabytes of image data — not unusual for a communications-heavy directorate — that means recovering 2 to 3.5 terabytes in the first pass alone.

The Canberra Institute of Technology, which operates across the Bruce and City campuses, faced a version of this problem after consolidating its marketing assets following a brand refresh in 2023. Duplicate images from multiple campaign cycles had accumulated across several disconnected storage environments. The remediation process took three months and required dedicated staff time — a cost that, while not publicly itemised, underscores that deduplication is not a zero-effort exercise.

For agencies and institutions now being asked to clean up their digital libraries before the Shared Services contract refresh, the practical path forward involves three steps: automated scanning to identify duplicates using hash-based tools, a governance decision on which version of a duplicated file becomes the canonical master record, and integration of deduplication rules into upload workflows so the problem doesn't regenerate itself. Getting that third step right is where most programs fall short — the scan is easy, the discipline is hard.

The ACT Government has not yet published targets or timelines for agency-level duplicate remediation, but the inclusion of audit requirements in this year's storage forecasting round suggests expectations are firming. Agencies that come to the table in late 2026 with clean numbers will be in a stronger position. Those that don't will be paying for the same photograph many times over.