Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Define What Comes Next

Canberra's public sector has a paperwork problem that no one likes to talk about: tens of thousands of duplicate images sitting across shared drives, content management systems and agency intranets, costing storage budget and creating legal headaches every time a rights-clearance audit turns up a photograph used in three places with a licence covering only one. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy team, housed within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate on London Circuit, is now working through how to resolve it — and the clock is ticking.

The timing matters for a specific reason. The ACT Government's whole-of-government cloud migration program, which began moving agency data in earnest from early 2025, has exposed just how badly image libraries have proliferated across departments. When records from Civic-based agencies were consolidated onto the new shared platform, auditors found duplicate assets across Health, Transport Canberra and City Services, and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate. The duplication isn't a nuisance — it is a compliance liability under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, particularly where stock photography with per-seat or per-use licences has been republished without fresh clearance.

What the Audit Found — and Who Has to Act

The problem sits at the intersection of procurement, records management and communications. Each directorate historically managed its own image assets. Transport Canberra, which runs the light rail network and the bus fleet out of its Woden offices, maintained a separate photography archive from the one held by the ACT Government's central communications team on Macquarie Street. When both sets of images were pulled into a unified digital asset management system — part of the broader GovCMS rollout that the Australian Government ran nationally — duplicates surfaced at scale.

The Australian National University's Scholarly Communication team, which advises researchers on copyright compliance, has publicly noted that duplicate-image problems in large institutions often trace back to the absence of a single authoritative asset register rather than any deliberate misuse. ANU itself moved to a centralised digital asset management platform in 2023. That experience is being studied by counterparts at the University of Canberra's library services division in Bruce, which is conducting its own image-library review ahead of a planned website rebuild later this year.

For government agencies, the decision tree is roughly this: identify duplicates, determine which version holds the cleanest rights clearance, retire the others, and update every page or document that referenced the retired file. That last step is where projects stall. The Environmental Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate alone has more than 400 web pages on the ACT Government's planning portal, many of which embed images pulled from the old shared drive system. Replacing those manually is estimated to take hundreds of staff hours without automated tooling.

The Decisions That Cannot Be Deferred

Three choices are now sitting with senior officials and they cannot be pushed past the end of the 2026 calendar year without triggering budget and compliance consequences. First: whether to procure a dedicated digital asset management system with automated deduplication, or extend the existing GovCMS configuration with custom plug-ins. Second: who owns the central image register — whether that responsibility sits with the Chief Minister's communications unit or is distributed back to individual directorates. Third: what to do about the roughly 1,200 images across ACT government websites that have no rights metadata attached at all, making their legal status effectively unknown.

The University of Canberra's planned website rebuild, expected to go to tender in the August-September 2026 window, may generate a useful data point. UC is understood to be requiring any incoming digital agency to deliver a full image-audit tool as part of the contract scope. How that specification is written — and what it costs — will give ACT government procurement officers a real-world benchmark before they finalise their own approach.

For public servants navigating this in Belconnen offices, Gungahlin shopfront service centres or anywhere else in the territory, the practical upshot is straightforward: before uploading any image to an internal or public-facing system in the second half of 2026, confirm with your directorate's communications team whether a central asset register entry already exists. The audit is ongoing. The last thing anyone needs is the same photograph appearing a fourth time under a third different filename.