How Canberra Is Handling the Duplicate Image Problem — and How It Stacks Up Against Cities Doing the Same

Canberra's public sector has a clutter problem you can't see from the street. Across ACT government agencies and federal departments headquartered in the city, IT and records management teams are dealing with ballooning digital asset libraries stuffed with redundant, near-identical images — a legacy of a decade of rapid digitisation, remote work file-sharing and the shift to cloud storage platforms. The duplication problem is costing agencies real money in storage, licensing and staff hours spent hunting down the authoritative version of a photograph or graphic.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 partly because of a broader reckoning with data hygiene inside the Australian Public Service. The Australian Public Service Commission's digital records guidance, updated in late 2025, flagged unstructured data — including image libraries — as a growing compliance risk. For a city whose economy runs almost entirely on government and knowledge work, the problem lands harder here than in a typical Australian capital.

What Canberra agencies are actually doing about it

The ACT Government's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate has been piloting a deduplication workflow since early 2026 across selected agencies, using hash-based file comparison tools to flag identical or near-identical image files before they are ingested into the whole-of-government content management system. The pilot is understood to be running across teams based at London Circuit offices in Civic, with results fed back to the broader data governance review due for completion in the third quarter of this year.

The Australian National University library, on Acton Peninsula, has faced a similar challenge managing its digitised special collections. The library's digital preservation team has used the open-source tool dHash — a perceptual hashing algorithm — to identify near-duplicate scans in its photographic archives, a process it began trialling formally in 2024. The University of Canberra at Bruce has been integrating commercial DAM (digital asset management) software across its communications and research storage systems, with a rollout that began in February 2026.

For federal departments, the scale is larger. Several Commonwealth agencies with major presences in Barton and Parkes hold image repositories that have not been systematically audited in years. Industry estimates from technology consultancies working in the federal government space — figures that circulate in procurement briefs rather than public reports — suggest that unmanaged duplicate files can represent 20 to 40 percent of total storage in large unstructured data environments. That range is consistent with figures published by Gartner in its 2024 data management research, which found redundant and obsolete data commonly accounts for roughly 30 percent of enterprise storage costs.

How Canberra compares internationally

Government-heavy cities elsewhere have moved faster. Wellington, New Zealand, completed a whole-of-government digital asset rationalisation program across its core public service in 2024, driven by the Department of Internal Affairs. Ottawa's Treasury Board Secretariat mandated metadata standards for government image assets in 2023 as part of its broader information management directive. Both cities benefited from smaller agency footprints and, critically, centralised storage infrastructure that made deduplication easier to enforce from the top down.

Copenhagen presents a different model. The Danish government's Agency for Digital Government has embedded automated deduplication into its standard file ingest pipeline since 2022, meaning duplicates are caught before they are ever stored rather than cleaned up after the fact — a prevention-first approach that Canberra has not yet adopted at scale.

Canberra's fragmented agency structure, with dozens of Commonwealth departments operating largely independent IT environments, makes the Copenhagen model difficult to replicate quickly. The ACT government's smaller footprint gives it more room to move, but its pilot remains exactly that — a pilot.

For public servants and researchers in Canberra managing their own digital assets, the practical advice from digital records specialists is consistent: implement a naming convention before a library grows large, run a deduplication check before any cloud migration, and treat image files the same as structured data when it comes to retention schedules. The ACT Government's records management framework, administered through Territory Records, already requires agencies to apply these standards — the gap, as with most compliance frameworks, is in consistent implementation.

The ACT pilot is expected to report findings by September. Whether those findings translate into a mandate, or simply a recommendation, will likely determine how quickly Canberra closes the gap on the cities already ahead of it.