Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

ACT government agencies are sitting on a backlog of duplicated digital images across multiple public-facing and internal databases, and the pressure to fix the problem is mounting. The issue — redundant, mismatched or conflicting image files stored across systems — has surfaced repeatedly in recent digital-governance reviews, with records managers, archivists and IT specialists now pushing for a coordinated response before it compounds further.

The timing matters. The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, which sets a roadmap through 2027, places data integrity at its centre. Duplicate imagery is not a cosmetic glitch; it creates compliance risks under the Territory Records Act 2002, inflates storage costs, and — critically for agencies managing public assets — can mean the wrong version of a document or site photo ends up in a planning or procurement decision.

Where the Problem Shows Up

Two institutions keep coming up in conversations among Canberra's digital records community: the ACT Planning directorate, which manages spatial imagery and building assessment photos across suburbs from Gungahlin to Tuggeranong, and the Australian National University's digital collections team on Acton's Chifley Road precinct. Both organisations maintain large image libraries that draw from multiple ingestion points — field officers, contractors, third-party consultants — creating fertile conditions for duplication.

At the planning directorate level, the concern is practical. When a residential development in, say, the Belconnen town centre corridor goes through assessment, multiple officers may upload site photos independently. Without a deduplication protocol, the same image can appear under different file names, different metadata tags, or even different assessed properties. That kind of administrative confusion has downstream consequences for Freedom of Information requests and for the integrity of development records that remain on the public register for decades.

The ANU Library, which operates one of the largest research image repositories in the southern hemisphere, has been working through a digitisation push since at least 2023. Librarians and digital archivists there have publicly flagged — through conference presentations and sector working groups — that legacy image management systems create near-duplicate proliferation when collections are migrated from older platforms. The University of Canberra's Bruce campus research services team faces comparable issues as it scales its own digital output.

What Needs to Happen, and When

Digital records specialists working across the ACT public sector broadly agree on a few fundamentals, even if agency-by-agency implementation lags behind. Perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually similar images even when file names or formats differ — is now considered the baseline standard for deduplication at scale. Tools that support this approach are commercially available, and several open-source options are actively used in local government contexts across Australia.

The ACT Government's whole-of-government procurement framework, updated in early 2025, already contemplates data-quality tooling under its ICT category schedules. The question is whether individual directorates are prioritising budget allocation for this category of work. Storage costs for government cloud infrastructure under the ACT's agreements with providers have risen in line with broader market trends — enterprise cloud storage pricing increased around 15 to 20 percent across major providers between 2023 and 2025, according to industry benchmarking published by Gartner — making the cost-of-inaction argument easier to make.

For public servants in Civic and Barton who manage image-heavy workflows, the practical advice from digital governance consultants is straightforward: conduct an audit before the next major system migration, not after. The cost of remediation grows non-linearly once duplicates are embedded across multiple integrated systems. A pre-migration audit of even a mid-sized image repository — say, 50,000 to 100,000 files — typically takes between four and eight weeks with appropriate tooling, according to sector guidance published by the Australian Society of Archivists.

A formal ACT Government policy on digital image deduplication does not yet exist as a standalone instrument. Whether the Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate moves to produce one in the current budget cycle — the 2026-27 ACT Budget was handed down in June — is the question records managers across town are now watching closely.