How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done About It

Federal agencies headquartered in Canberra are sitting on digital asset libraries bloated with thousands of duplicate images — the result of more than a decade of ad hoc file storage, staff turnover, and successive content management system migrations that nobody fully audited. The problem didn't arrive overnight, and the path to fixing it runs directly through decisions made — and deferred — across the capital's sprawling public service.

The issue matters now because the ACT and Commonwealth governments are both mid-stream on digital transformation programs that require clean, searchable, rights-cleared image libraries. Agencies pushing content through new web platforms, including the Services Australia redesign rolled out from its Tuggeranong campus and the Department of Finance's updated internal publishing tools at One Canberra Avenue, Forrest, are discovering that duplicate images aren't just a storage cost — they create legal exposure around copyright, inconsistent branding, and version-control failures that can surface publicly at the worst moments.

How the Clutter Accumulated

The roots go back to the early 2010s, when most Commonwealth agencies ran parallel intranet and public-facing websites on separate content management systems. Staff uploading photography from events at places like the National Press Club on National Circuit or the Australian Institute of Sport in Bruce would drop files into whichever shared drive was closest to hand. No taxonomy. No deduplication. When agencies merged or restructured — the Department of Human Services absorbed several bodies before itself becoming Services Australia in 2019 — file libraries came with them, unexamined.

The Australian National University's digital humanities researchers documented a related pattern in 2023, noting that institutional repositories across the higher education sector routinely carried duplication rates of between 30 and 45 percent in unmanaged image collections. While that research focused on academic archives rather than government systems, procurement officers at the Digital Transformation Agency, based in Nishi building on London Circuit in the city, have cited comparable internal estimates when briefing vendors on remediation contracts.

Microsoft's SharePoint, widely used across the APS, does not natively deduplicate image assets across site collections. That architectural reality meant that every time a communications team in one branch uploaded a stock photo already sitting in three other corners of the same agency's tenancy, the system accepted it without complaint. Over years and multiple content refreshes, libraries at mid-sized agencies can accumulate tens of thousands of files, with effective unique content representing less than half the total storage consumed.

The Remediation Push

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy, updated in late 2024, flagged digital asset governance as a priority for the 2025–26 financial year. Territory agencies including Transport Canberra, whose operational communications team works out of the Woden bus depot precinct, and the ACT Health communications directorate at Canberra Health Services in Garran, were among those flagged for internal audits. The territory's procurement portal listed asset management software evaluations beginning in the first quarter of 2026.

At the federal level, the Digital Transformation Agency has encouraged agencies to adopt dedicated digital asset management platforms — tools built specifically to hash image files on ingestion and flag or merge duplicates automatically. Several vendors have been on the DTA's Digital Marketplace since 2021, though uptake among smaller Commonwealth entities remained uneven through 2025.

For agencies now working through the remediation process, the practical sequence tends to follow the same pattern: run an automated duplication scan, produce a report ranked by file-count and storage volume, manually review high-traffic assets for rights metadata, then migrate clean libraries into the new platform before decommissioning legacy folders. Agencies that skipped the rights-metadata step in earlier migrations are finding it the most labour-intensive phase — particularly for photography sourced from events and ministerial visits where no formal licensing agreement was ever recorded.

The upside is that agencies completing the process are reporting meaningful reductions in content production costs, because communications staff can actually find approved images rather than commissioning new ones. For a public service workforce already watching its operating budgets tighten heading into the 2026–27 federal budget cycle, that is not a trivial dividend. The groundwork was always there to be done. It just took long enough that the cost of not doing it finally outgrew the cost of getting started.