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

A growing stockpile of duplicate and outdated images embedded across ACT government websites, internal databases and public record systems has forced administrators to confront a problem they have largely deferred for years: what do you actually do when you find one, and who is responsible for fixing it?

The question matters now because two converging pressures have made the status quo untenable. The ACT's whole-of-government digital accessibility review, which ran through the first half of 2026, flagged image duplication as a compliance risk under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 framework. At the same time, agencies migrating legacy content onto the unified ServiceCanberra platform are discovering that image libraries built over more than a decade contain overlapping files — sometimes hundreds of near-identical versions of the same stock photograph or departmental headshot — with no clear record of which version is the authorised one.

Where the Problem Shows Up

The Australian National University's library digitisation program, which has been running out of the Chifley Library on the Acton campus, encountered the issue directly when cataloguing historical image sets earlier this year. Staff found multiple scanned versions of the same archival photograph entered under different accession numbers, some with conflicting metadata. The duplication wasn't malicious — it was the predictable result of different teams scanning the same materials at different times without a shared registry.

Across town, the ACT Health Directorate's public health communications team, based on Bowes Street in Phillip, has been quietly auditing image assets used across its campaign websites. Health promotion materials produced for programs like the annual flu vaccination push and the 2024 skin cancer awareness campaign were found to include image files replicated across at least three separate content management systems. The directorate has not publicly disclosed the scale of the audit, but the migration to the centralised platform has made the duplication visible in a way it wasn't before.

The Gungahlin Community Council's digital noticeboard project, launched in late 2024 to improve resident communications in one of Canberra's fastest-growing suburbs, ran into the same wall almost immediately. Volunteer administrators found they had inherited image folders from three previous iterations of the council's website, with no deletion policy and no version control. The practical result: a 4.2 gigabyte folder containing roughly 1,800 image files, of which initial checks suggested fewer than 400 were unique.

The Decisions Nobody Wants to Make

The core difficulty is not technical. Deduplication software is widely available and, for most government-scale image libraries, not expensive. The hard part is governance: deciding which copy is canonical, who has authority to delete the others, and how to handle cases where the duplicates have each accumulated their own metadata, usage histories or legal attribution records.

For agencies operating under the Archives Act 1983, deletion is not straightforward. The National Archives of Australia, headquartered on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, applies disposal authorities that require agencies to assess whether a digital record — including an image file — has ongoing administrative, legal or historical value before it can be destroyed. Duplicate images that have been formally published, even if superseded, may fall within record-keeping obligations that preclude simple deletion.

The practical path most agencies appear to be moving toward involves a three-stage process: identify duplicates through automated hash-matching tools, quarantine rather than delete the secondary copies, and assign a named records officer to approve final disposal decisions. That approach satisfies the Archives Act requirements but slows the cleanup considerably. Agencies working through the ServiceCanberra migration have been advised to complete image audits before their scheduled platform transition dates, the majority of which fall between September and December 2026.

For organisations outside the formal public service — community councils, university departments, ACT government-funded not-for-profits — the stakes are lower legally but the practical confusion is just as real. The ACT Digital Strategy office has indicated it will publish updated guidance on image asset governance later in the third quarter of 2026. Until then, administrators at places like the Gungahlin Community Council are largely working from their own judgment. The guidance, when it arrives, will not resolve every dispute about which image survives. But it should at least clarify who gets to make the call.