How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up With a Duplicate Image Problem — and What It's Costing Them

The ACT Government's digital content stockpile has a problem hiding in plain sight. Duplicate images — identical or near-identical photographs, graphics and icons stored multiple times across separate content management systems — have quietly accumulated across agency websites for at least a decade, inflating storage costs, slowing page load times and creating compliance headaches that are only now being properly costed.

The issue matters now because several major ACT and federal agencies are mid-way through digital transformation projects that require them to audit and consolidate legacy content before migrating to new platforms. For agencies headquartered along Northbourne Avenue and in the parliamentary triangle, that audit is exposing just how far the problem runs.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots go back to the period between roughly 2015 and 2020, when individual ACT Government directorates — including Transport Canberra and City Services, and the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate — operated largely independent web presences with their own content teams and upload workflows. When the ACT Government moved toward a unified digital service model, content was often migrated by copying assets wholesale rather than deduplicating them first. The result was that a single photograph of, say, the Gungahlin Town Centre or a light rail tram on Flemington Road might exist in six or seven versions across different folders and databases.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the mess. Between March 2020 and mid-2022, agencies rapidly spun up new web pages, landing pages and information hubs to handle public health communications, support programs and service updates. Designers and communications staff working under pressure pulled images from wherever they could find them, with little time for library housekeeping. By the time those emergency pages were archived, the duplicate count had grown substantially.

The Australian National University's Digital Humanities Hub on Acton campus documented a comparable dynamic in its own institutional repositories, noting in a 2023 internal review — cited in a subsequent ANU Library services report — that repository inefficiency from duplicated assets was measurable and addressable with standard deduplication tooling. For government agencies handling far larger public-facing libraries, the scale is proportionally greater.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Cloud storage is cheap per gigabyte, but the costs compound across multiple dimensions. A single agency paying for a mid-tier content delivery network arrangement can expect to pay meaningfully more when bloated asset libraries force repeated cache refreshes and slower delivery to end users in outer suburbs like Belconnen and Tuggeranong, where NBN speeds remain inconsistent. Beyond bandwidth, there are staff-hours: content editors who cannot find the authoritative version of an image spend time searching or re-uploading, which is an entirely avoidable drag on productivity.

Accessibility compliance adds another layer of urgency. The Australian Government's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines obligations require that images carry accurate and consistent alt-text. When the same image exists in multiple locations under different file names, there is no guarantee that metadata — including alt descriptions — is consistent across all instances. That inconsistency creates legal exposure under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, a point the Digital Transformation Agency has flagged in general guidance published on its website as recently as 2024.

Canberra's University of Canberra, whose Bruce campus communications team manages a substantial digital asset library for student-facing and research content, began a structured deduplication audit in early 2025, moving toward a centralised digital asset management system. The exercise is understood to have identified thousands of redundant files accumulated since at least 2017, though the university has not published specific figures publicly.

For ACT and federal agencies now undertaking similar exercises, the practical path forward involves three steps: an automated hash-comparison scan to flag identical files, a manual review pass for near-duplicates that differ only in resolution or cropping, and a governance policy that assigns a single authoritative source for each image going forward. Agencies that have already invested in platforms like Drupal 10 — which the ACT Government has been progressively adopting for public-facing sites — have access to built-in media library tools that make deduplication considerably easier than it was under older CMS arrangements. Getting the governance policy right, however, requires decisions about who owns the master library, and that organisational question tends to take longer to resolve than the technical one.