How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up with Thousands of Duplicate Images — and What They're Doing About It

ACT government agencies and Commonwealth departments based in Canberra are sitting on digital image libraries bloated with duplicate, near-duplicate, and redundant files — a problem that has quietly compounded since the mass digitisation push of the early 2010s and is now costing real money in storage, licensing, and staff time. The practice of duplicate image replacement, once treated as a minor housekeeping task, has become a genuine infrastructure concern for organisations managing thousands of assets across shared networks.

The timing matters. With the federal government's ongoing consolidation of digital services under the Australian Government Architecture framework, and the ACT's own Digital Strategy 2025–2028 pushing agencies toward leaner, more auditable content pipelines, the pressure to clean up legacy image libraries has intensified. Agencies that cannot demonstrate clean, deduplicated asset registers risk falling outside compliance benchmarks being applied to Commonwealth-funded digital programs.

How the Duplication Problem Accumulated

The roots of the current mess trace back to at least 2012, when multiple ACT government directorates began scanning and uploading physical records without centralised naming conventions or metadata standards. The same photograph of, say, the Civic interchange or a planning document relating to the Gungahlin town centre might exist in four or five different folders under different file names, uploaded by different staff members across different directorates. When those directorates merged or restructured — as happened repeatedly under successive ACT governments — their digital archives merged too, usually without any deduplication step.

The Commonwealth side of the problem has a similar shape. Agencies clustered around the parliamentary triangle — including those with large public-facing websites maintained from offices in Barton and Parkes — accumulated image libraries through successive web redesigns. Each redesign typically involved a content migration, and content migrations almost always imported legacy duplicates wholesale rather than rationalising them. A 2023 audit of one mid-sized Commonwealth agency's content management system, details of which circulated within digital governance circles, reportedly found that roughly 30 percent of stored image files were functionally identical to at least one other file in the same repository.

The Australian National University's Digital Humanities Hub on Acton Peninsula has done related research into the cost of unmanaged digital asset libraries in public-sector contexts. While ANU's work has focused primarily on cultural heritage collections, the underlying principles apply directly to government communications archives: unresolved duplication inflates storage costs, slows search and retrieval, and creates legal risk when licensing terms differ between versions of what appears to be the same image.

What Replacement Actually Involves — and Where It Stands Now

Duplicate image replacement is not simply deleting files. The process requires identifying canonical versions, checking licensing and attribution for each, updating all references across websites and internal systems, and then archiving or destroying the surplus copies in a way that satisfies records management obligations under the Territory Records Act 2002. For large agencies, that is months of work, not days.

Several ACT government directorates have begun scoping that work in earnest during the 2025–26 financial year. The Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, which oversees whole-of-government digital policy from its offices on London Circuit, has been coordinating a cross-directorate working group on digital asset governance. The group's scope explicitly includes image library rationalisation.

The University of Canberra's Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis, based at the Bruce campus, has argued in published work that the governance gap around digital assets in Australian public administration is structural rather than accidental — the product of procurement cycles that reward new capability over maintenance of existing systems.

For agencies and their staff navigating this now, the practical path forward involves three steps: audit existing image repositories against a single naming and metadata standard, run deduplication software to flag candidate duplicates for human review, and then execute a staged replacement program tied to the next scheduled website or content management system update. Agencies that attempt to decouple image replacement from a broader content migration typically find the process takes twice as long and costs significantly more. The lesson from the past decade is that leaving it until the next redesign only deepens the pile.