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

A quiet but consequential problem has been building inside Canberra's government offices. Duplicate images — identical or near-identical photographs, diagrams and graphics stored across multiple systems — have accumulated across federal and ACT government databases to the point where agencies are now being pushed to act. The trigger is a combination of storage cost pressures, a looming whole-of-government digital asset policy review, and fresh scrutiny over whether published government communications have been using outdated or mismatched imagery.

The issue matters now because the federal government's Digital Transformation Agency is mid-way through a broader audit of content management systems used by Commonwealth entities, with a reporting milestone expected before the end of the 2026 calendar year. At the same time, the ACT Government's own Shared Services ICT division has flagged storage rationalisation as a budget priority following cost reviews tied to the 2026-27 ACT Budget handed down in June. Duplicate image files are a visible, solvable symptom of a deeper problem: agencies that grew their digital infrastructure fast, without coordinated governance.

Where the Pressure Is Landing

Two Canberra institutions are feeling this most acutely right now. The Australian National University, which manages one of the largest open-access image repositories in the southern hemisphere through its ANU Press and library systems on Acton campus, has been working since early 2026 to deduplicate its digital collections ahead of a storage contract renewal. Separately, the National Archives of Australia — headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes — faces the same structural challenge at a far larger scale, given its mandate to preserve federal records in perpetuity.

For ACT government agencies operating out of Civic and the Tuggeranong office precinct, the practical consequences are more immediate. Communications teams publishing to platforms like ACT Government's Access Canberra web properties have, in some cases, been working from image libraries where the same photograph exists in three or four versions — different resolutions, different filenames, different metadata — spread across SharePoint folders and legacy content management systems. When an image needs to be updated or removed, tracking down every instance becomes a manual task that can take hours.

The University of Canberra's Centre for Computational Media Creativity, based at the Bruce campus, has been consulting with several ACT directorates on automated deduplication tools. Perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually similar images even when file names or formats differ — is among the approaches being piloted. The technology is not new, but its application in government procurement contexts requires careful handling around data sovereignty and vendor access to sensitive imagery.

The Decisions That Cannot Wait

Three choices will define how this plays out. First, agencies need to decide whether to centralise image storage under a single authoritative system or maintain distributed repositories with better synchronisation. Centralisation is cheaper long-term but requires upfront investment and, critically, agreement between departments that have historically guarded their own systems. Second, there is the question of which duplicate to keep. When two versions of the same image exist — one higher resolution, one with correct accessibility metadata — the right answer is not always obvious, and getting it wrong has compliance implications under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 that the Australian Government formally adopted.

Third, and most politically sensitive, is who pays. Storage costs for federal agencies are typically absorbed through whole-of-government contracts managed by Services Australia, but remediation work — the human labour of auditing and rationalising tens of thousands of image files — falls to individual agency budgets. For smaller ACT directorates already stretched after public service efficiency measures, that cost is not trivial.

The Digital Transformation Agency's review is expected to produce guidance, not mandates, by December 2026. That gives agencies roughly five months to get ahead of the problem on their own terms, or wait and implement whatever framework emerges. History suggests most will wait. The ones that move now — building clean, well-tagged, deduplicated image libraries before the guidance lands — will be in a considerably stronger position when the next audit cycle begins.