How Canberra's Government Websites Got Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Why Nobody Fixed It Sooner

Thousands of duplicate images are clogging the content management systems of ACT and federal government websites — a problem that has compounded quietly over more than a decade and is now forcing a coordinated cleanup effort across agencies headquartered in Canberra's parliamentary triangle and beyond.

The issue matters now because the ACT Government is mid-way through a broader digital transformation push, and audits conducted internally by the Digital, Data and Technology Solutions (DDTS) branch have exposed just how cluttered the underlying infrastructure has become. When agencies migrated from older platforms — many between 2014 and 2018 — image libraries were often carried across wholesale, without deduplication, creating layered redundancy that has ballooned storage costs and slowed page-load times on citizen-facing services.

How the Problem Built Up Over Years

The roots of the issue trace back to the federation of content responsibilities across the ACT Public Service. Different directorates — Health, Transport Canberra, Environment — operated largely separate web presences, each with its own editorial team uploading assets independently. A photograph of the Lake Burley Griffin foreshore, for instance, might exist in a dozen variations across the Access Canberra portal, the Visit Canberra tourism site, and the Chief Minister's departmental pages, each copy uploaded at a slightly different resolution or file name to satisfy a specific campaign need.

At the federal level, the Australian Public Service Commission's guidance on digital asset management, updated in 2022, urged departments to adopt centralised digital asset management (DAM) systems, but uptake remained patchy. Agencies based along the Northbourne Avenue corridor — including several that shifted operations to the Woden Town Centre precinct — continued to maintain siloed image repositories well into 2025.

The volume involved is not trivial. Across government content management systems, duplicated image files can account for a meaningful share of total media storage — a pattern observed broadly in public sector digital audits — consuming server resources and complicating the work of web editors who cannot easily determine which version of an image is current, licensed, or accessibility-compliant under Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 standards that took effect in October 2023.

The Cleanup and What Comes Next

The ACT Government's DDTS branch, operating out of Canberra City, is understood to be piloting a duplicate-detection workflow using automated hashing tools — software that generates a unique fingerprint for each image file and flags identical or near-identical copies for review. The University of Canberra's Human Centred Technology Research Centre, based at the Bruce campus, has previously worked with territory agencies on related digital systems challenges, making it a potential partner for the longer remediation phase.

The Australian National University's digital communications team on Acton Peninsula has separately tackled a version of this problem, consolidating image libraries ahead of a website rebuild completed in late 2024. The lesson from that process: deduplication works best when paired with a clear ownership model — each image assigned to a named content owner who is responsible for updates and licence renewals.

For ACT government web editors, the practical steps being recommended internally involve three stages: automated scanning to identify duplicates, human review to select the canonical version, and then metadata tagging so the approved image is retrievable across directorates without re-uploading. The process is labour-intensive at the outset. One government digital project documented in the UK's Central Digital and Data Office guidance estimated that a mid-sized agency media library of around 50,000 assets could require 200-plus staff hours to triage properly — a figure Canberra agencies will likely recognise.

The broader push also connects to cost. Cloud storage is not free, and as ACT Government services shift further onto platforms with consumption-based pricing, every redundant gigabyte carries a recurring line cost. Cleaning up the image estate is, in that sense, as much a budget exercise as a digital hygiene one.

Agencies expecting to launch redesigned public-facing portals before the end of the 2026-27 financial year have been advised to complete image audits before migration — not after. Getting the library right before the next platform move, rather than carrying the problem forward again, is the lesson that Canberra's digital teams have learned, slowly and at some expense.