How Canberra's Government Agencies Got Buried in Duplicate Images — and Why It's Now a Problem They Can't Ignore

Somewhere inside a network drive at a Civic-based federal agency, the same photograph of Parliament House exists in at least a dozen slightly different file sizes, uploaded by different staff members across different decades, none of them knowing the others existed. Multiply that by hundreds of agencies, statutory bodies, and ACT government departments, and you begin to understand how duplicate image replacement became one of the more unglamorous but genuinely costly technology problems facing Canberra's public sector in 2026.

The issue has sharpened this year because of converging pressures: the federal government's ongoing digital transformation agenda through the Department of Finance's Whole of Australian Government platforms program, the ACT Government's own digital asset review scheduled for completion by September 2026, and a broader push by the Australian Public Service Commission to reduce unnecessary IT expenditure ahead of the mid-year budget update. Duplicate digital assets — images in particular — sit at the intersection of all three.

How the Duplication Built Up

It did not happen overnight. The pattern stretches back to the early 2000s, when agencies at places like Barton and Woden began digitising their communications functions. Each team built its own folder hierarchy. The National Archives of Australia, based on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, has documented how the absence of shared taxonomy standards in those early years meant that a single image of, say, the Reconciliation Place memorial on the lakeshore could end up stored under "events," "locations," "ceremonies," and "2004" simultaneously — across four different team drives.

The shift to cloud infrastructure accelerated the problem rather than solving it. When agencies migrated to platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint from roughly 2015 onward, they frequently uploaded existing local drive contents wholesale, without deduplication. The result was that legacy duplicates were carried forward and new ones were created on top. A 2023 audit of ACT Government digital storage conducted by the ACT Auditor-General's Office found that unstructured data — the category that includes image libraries — accounted for a disproportionate share of cloud storage costs, though the specific dollar figure was not publicly released in the summary findings.

The Australian National University's College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics, located on Acton's Ellery Crescent, has researched this problem in the public sector context. Academic work from that group has identified that government image libraries frequently carry duplication rates of between 30 and 60 percent, depending on how long the organisation has been digitally active and how many restructures it has been through. Machinery-of-government changes — Canberra's version of a corporate restructure — are a particular culprit, because merging two agencies means merging two asset libraries with no reconciliation step built into the process.

What Duplicate Image Replacement Actually Involves

The practical task is more involved than simply running a "find duplicates" tool. Images stored at different resolutions or with different metadata are not always recognised as identical by automated systems. A communications officer at a Phillip-based statutory authority might have cropped a departmental headshot to fit a specific web template, creating a technically distinct file that is functionally the same image. Replacing duplicates correctly means identifying canonical versions, updating every internal link or CMS reference that points to a redundant file, and then archiving or deleting the surplus — a process that, for a mid-sized agency with several years of web content, can take months.

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025-2028, published by the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, nominates asset rationalisation as a priority action for the current financial year. Agencies with significant public-facing web presences — including Transport Canberra, which manages imagery across its light rail and bus network communications, and Access Canberra, which handles licensing and permit content — have been identified internally as early candidates for the rationalisation work.

For public servants working in communications and digital roles across Civic and the inner-south, the practical upshot is likely to be a period of mandatory content audits. Agencies have been advised to begin cataloguing image libraries using the National Archives' Digital Continuity 2020 Policy framework as a baseline. The September 2026 deadline for the ACT review gives departments roughly ten weeks to get preliminary inventories in order. That timeline is tight, and the agencies that started later will feel it.