How Canberra Is Tackling Duplicate Digital Images — and How It Compares to Cities Like Helsinki and Singapore

Canberra's digital storage problem has a very specific shape: thousands of duplicate images sitting across agency servers, costing taxpayers money and slowing down public access to government records. The ACT government's Digital Records Unit, operating out of offices near London Circuit in Civic, has been running a deduplication program since early 2025, targeting shared image libraries held by more than a dozen ACT directorates. The scale of the problem, while not unique to the capital, is sharpened here by Canberra's identity as a government town — virtually every major employer in Belconnen and Barton is a public agency with its own image archive.

The issue matters now because the federal government's broader digital transformation push, which has accelerated since the 2025-26 budget committed to cloud migration across Commonwealth entities, is forcing agencies to confront what they actually have stored. Duplicated images — promotional photos, infrastructure shots, policy document graphics — inflate cloud storage costs, complicate freedom-of-information responses, and create compliance headaches under the Archives Act 1983. For a city where the public service is the primary economic engine, inefficiency in records management is not an abstract concern.

What Canberra Is Actually Doing

The ACT government's approach centres on the Digital Asset Management Framework, a policy document updated in March 2026 that sets standards for image metadata, retention schedules and automated deduplication across directorates. The framework applies to agencies including Transport Canberra and City Services, which manages tens of thousands of infrastructure photographs taken along corridors such as Flemington Road in Gungahlin and the Northbourne Avenue light rail corridor. The Australian National University's library and archives division has also developed its own parallel deduplication protocols for its Chifley Library digitisation program, working through a backlog of scanned historical images that had accumulated across multiple collection databases.

The approach is methodical rather than rapid. Canberra's directorates are using hash-matching software to identify exact duplicates and perceptual-hash tools for near-duplicates — standard technology, but the rollout has been phased across financial years rather than executed in a single push. That pace reflects both the conservative culture of ACT public administration and genuine resource constraints: the Digital Records Unit operates with a small specialist team, and the ACT's 2025-26 budget allocated funding for digital records modernisation as part of a broader $4.3 million whole-of-government information management initiative.

How That Compares Globally

Helsinki moved faster. The City of Helsinki's digitalisation office completed a city-wide image deduplication project across its municipal departments in 2023, consolidating more than 1.2 million files into a single asset management platform within 14 months. Singapore's Government Technology Agency, known as GovTech, embedded automated deduplication as a mandatory feature of its whole-of-government media library by 2022, meaning new duplicates are flagged at point of upload rather than caught in retrospective audits. Both cities benefited from smaller bureaucratic footprints and stronger central mandates — Helsinki's project was driven by a single mayoral directive, and GovTech has authority that cuts across Singapore's entire public sector.

Wellington, New Zealand — a comparable capital city with a similarly public-service-heavy workforce — is closer to Canberra's position. Wellington City Council and the New Zealand Public Service Commission have been working through image deduplication as part of a broader cloud transition since 2024, with a similarly staged approach and similar interdepartmental coordination challenges. Both cities are dealing with the same structural problem: records management mandates that predate the digital era, layered on top of systems built by individual agencies without interoperability in mind.

For Canberrans with a stake in this — which, given the workforce, means most of the inner north, Woden and Tuggeranong — the practical upshot is that slower deduplication means slower FOI responses and higher long-term storage costs absorbed into agency budgets. The Digital Records Unit has indicated the ACT-wide program is scheduled for full implementation by June 2027. Agencies that want to get ahead of that deadline have existing guidance in the March 2026 framework. The question is whether individual directorates treat the deadline as a floor or a ceiling.