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

Thousands of duplicate images are sitting inside the digital asset management systems used by ACT government agencies and research institutions across Canberra, clogging storage infrastructure, inflating licensing costs and creating real legal headaches for records managers trying to comply with the Territory Records Act 2002. The problem has been building for years. The decisions about how to fix it are now urgent.

The immediate trigger is a scheduled procurement round. The ACT Government Shared Services directorate, which manages centralised IT infrastructure for territory agencies, is expected to finalise contracts for updated digital asset management platforms before the end of the 2026 calendar year. Whatever systems are chosen will need to include — or be retrofitted with — automated deduplication tools capable of handling image libraries that have grown substantially since the shift to hybrid work arrangements accelerated after 2020. Without that capability baked in, agencies risk migrating the same duplicate files into newer, more expensive systems.

Why Canberra's Situation Is Different

This is not a generic technology story. Canberra's public sector is unusually concentrated. Tens of thousands of federal and territory public servants work within a compact geography — offices along Northbourne Avenue, the Civic precinct, Barton and Parkes — and many share or exchange digital materials across agency boundaries. When an image is used in a ministerial brief, repurposed in an agency communications campaign and then uploaded again by a contractor, three or four copies of the same file can end up in entirely separate records systems, each tagged differently and none flagged as redundant.

The Australian National University's School of Computing, based on the Acton campus, has been active in research around large-scale image deduplication, including perceptual hashing techniques that can identify near-identical images even when file formats or metadata differ. The University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, on Kirinari Street in Bruce, has separately grappled with the issue in the context of managing digitised collections from regional arts organisations. Both institutions have found that manual review processes are not viable at scale — the volume of material simply outpaces human capacity.

Storage costs are a concrete pressure. Enterprise cloud storage for government-grade systems in Australia was running at roughly $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard-tier services as of mid-2025, according to published price lists from major cloud providers. Across a medium-sized agency holding several hundred thousand image files — not unusual for a department with active communications, planning or health functions — duplicate content can account for between 15 and 40 percent of total storage volume, according to published industry research on enterprise digital asset management. That translates directly to recurring budget waste.

The Decisions That Will Define the Outcome

Three choices are coming up fast. First, agencies need to decide whether deduplication happens before or after any platform migration. Cleaning up before migration is slower and more disruptive in the short term but prevents legacy problems from being imported wholesale into new infrastructure. Doing it after is faster to start but risks compounding existing confusion if tagging and metadata systems differ between old and new platforms.

Second, there is the question of governance. The ACT's Territory Records Office, which sits within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate and operates under the framework established by the Territory Records Act, will need to issue updated guidance on how agencies classify and retain duplicate images — particularly for images that have been used in official publications. Without that guidance, agencies will make inconsistent decisions, some retaining every copy for compliance reasons, others deleting files that may later be needed.

Third, procurement officers at Shared Services will need to determine whether deduplication capability is listed as a mandatory requirement in upcoming tender documents, or left as an optional feature. That single line in a contract specification could determine whether the territory's image management problems are genuinely addressed or simply deferred again.

Agencies wanting to get ahead of the process should begin auditing current image holdings now, before tender documents are published. Records managers at the Civic offices of smaller territory agencies in particular should document their current storage volumes and identify which systems hold the largest concentrations of untagged or duplicated files. The window for influencing the final procurement specifications — and the policy guidance that will accompany them — is unlikely to stay open much past September.