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

Canberra's public institutions are facing a fork in the road over how they handle duplicate images stored across government and university digital archives, with decisions on replacement technology, data governance policy, and procurement timelines all expected to land before the end of 2026.

The issue has been building quietly for years. As ACT government agencies migrated records to cloud platforms and institutions like the Australian National University shifted to centralised digital asset management, the same image files — photographs, scanned documents, geospatial imagery — were routinely duplicated across multiple systems. Identifying, replacing, and retiring those duplicates is neither cheap nor straightforward, and the decisions about how to do it carry real consequences for storage costs, archival integrity, and freedom-of-information compliance.

Why Now, and What's at Stake

Three forces have converged to push the issue up the agenda in mid-2026. First, the ACT government's Digital Strategy 2025–2030, which is already underway, includes benchmarks for data deduplication across directorates by December 2026. Second, the National Archives of Australia, based at the Queen Victoria Terrace complex in Parkes, has been tightening its records disposal standards for Commonwealth-adjacent bodies, adding pressure on institutions that share data with federal agencies. Third, storage costs are not trivial: enterprise cloud storage for large image archives commonly runs into six figures annually for mid-sized organisations, and duplicated files directly inflate that bill.

At ANU's Chifley Library precinct on Acton Peninsula, librarians and digital archivists have been working through a deduplication audit that began in early 2025. The university holds tens of thousands of digitised photographs and research images across at least four separate repository systems. The audit is expected to produce a formal recommendation on replacement architecture by August 2026. The university has not publicly disclosed the cost of the audit or its findings to date.

Across town at the ACT Education Directorate offices in Macquarie, a parallel process is underway. The directorate manages image assets for 88 public schools, and school-level photography databases have historically been maintained independently, producing significant duplication when images are uploaded to the central MySchools platform. The directorate's internal project plan, referenced in a budget estimates hearing earlier this year, set a target of reducing duplicate image storage by 30 per cent before the end of the 2026–27 financial year.

The Replacement Decision Is the Hard Part

Identifying duplicates is now largely an automated task. Software tools using perceptual hashing — a technique that matches visually similar images even when file names or metadata differ — can flag likely duplicates at scale. The harder question is what replaces the images that are retired, and who holds the authoritative version when originals differ slightly between copies.

That question matters most for records with legal or heritage significance. The ACT Heritage Library, which operates out of Woden Town Centre and holds digitised collections dating to the early twentieth century, must ensure that any image retired as a duplicate is genuinely identical to the version retained — not a different scan of the same physical document. A rushed deduplication that collapses two distinct scans into one could permanently destroy archival information.

Procurement is the next practical hurdle. ACT government agencies acquiring new digital asset management systems are required to go through the whole-of-government ICT procurement panel, a process that can take four to eight months from initial specification to contract execution. Any agency hoping to have a replacement system operational before the December 2026 strategy deadline would need to have submitted a procurement brief by no later than August.

For organisations watching from the outside — including Canberra-based consultancies on the Nishi building strip in NewActon that specialise in government ICT — the window for influencing specifications is closing fast. The decisions taken in the next eight weeks will determine not just which software gets bought, but how Canberra's public institutions define what a record is, who owns it, and how long it lives.