How Canberra's Government Agencies Got Buried in Duplicate Images — and What They're Doing About It

The ACT government's digital asset problem did not arrive overnight. Across agencies headquartered in Civic, Barton and Fyshwick, the same photograph of the Australian War Memorial at dusk, or an aerial shot of the Gungahlin town centre, might exist in a dozen separate folders on a dozen separate servers — each uploaded independently, none of them talking to the others. That is the fundamental problem duplicate image replacement programs are now being built to solve.

Why does this matter right now? The ACT Budget delivered in June 2025 allocated new funding toward whole-of-government digital infrastructure consolidation, part of a broader modernisation push that has been building since the ACT Digital Strategy 2025-2028 was published by the ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate. Agencies are under fresh pressure to demonstrate they are eliminating waste in their back-office systems before requesting additional operational dollars. Duplicate image libraries — unglamorous as they are — have become a test case for that discipline.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots go back to the early 2010s, when individual ACT directorates began building their own web presences and communications teams in earnest. Transport Canberra, Health, Education and Environment each developed content workflows with separate contracted photographers and separate storage solutions. The National Capital Authority, which is a federal body but whose work is deeply woven into Canberra's built environment from Commonwealth Avenue to the Parliamentary Triangle, maintained its own entirely separate image repository. So did the Australian National University on Acton Peninsula and the University of Canberra at Bruce.

By the time cloud storage became standard across the public service around 2017 and 2018, the damage was already embedded in institutional practice. Staff would routinely download a photo from a shared drive, rename it to something descriptive to their team, and re-upload it to a new folder. Version control was largely manual. A single campaign image for a light rail Stage 2 consultation — the kind of render showing a tram on Northbourne Avenue — might sit in Transport Canberra's SharePoint, a communications officer's OneDrive, the Chief Minister's digital archive and an external agency's Dropbox simultaneously. Multiply that across thousands of assets and years of campaigns and the scale becomes apparent.

Storage costs are not trivial. Enterprise cloud storage at the scale ACT government operates — across more than 30,000 public servants — runs into millions of dollars annually in licensing and data fees, though the government has not publicly broken out what proportion of that is attributable to redundant assets specifically. Industry benchmarks published by Gartner in 2024 suggested that between 20 and 40 per cent of enterprise digital storage in comparable public sector organisations consists of duplicate or near-duplicate files.

What a Duplicate Image Replacement Program Actually Looks Like

The technical response involves perceptual hashing — an algorithm that generates a fingerprint for each image based on its visual content rather than its file name or metadata. Two photos of the Molonglo River corridor taken on different days might have different file names and different timestamps but produce near-identical hashes, flagging them for human review. Software platforms built on this approach can scan a library of hundreds of thousands of assets in hours and produce a report ranking duplicate clusters by storage volume consumed.

The ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate has been working with agencies on piloting this kind of tool as part of the broader content governance framework. The University of Canberra's library at the Bruce campus has similarly been working through its digital collections. Neither institution has made specific results public at this stage.

For public servants in Canberra navigating this shift, the practical advice from digital records specialists is consistent: do not wait for a top-down mandate before auditing your team's shared drives. The agencies that will find the transition least painful are those that establish a single source of truth for approved imagery now — a named folder, a named custodian, a clear naming convention — rather than scrambling to reverse years of ad hoc storage when the directorate-wide audit arrives. That audit, for most ACT agencies, is no longer a hypothetical.