How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and Why Fixing It Took So Long

The problem did not arrive overnight. Across the ACT government's network of public-facing websites — from the Access Canberra service portal to the Transport Canberra pages tracking light rail updates — digital asset libraries have quietly ballooned with duplicate images over the better part of a decade, creating storage headaches, slowing page-load times and complicating compliance with federal accessibility standards.

Duplicate image replacement — the systematic process of auditing, consolidating and re-linking redundant image files within a content management system — has moved from a background IT annoyance to a formal project priority for several agencies this year. The timing is not accidental. The Australian Government's Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy, which sets benchmarks under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, has sharpened scrutiny on what agencies are actually publishing online, not merely whether their code passes an automated checker.

How the Libraries Got This Bloated

The roots of the problem trace back to the mid-2010s, when federal and territory agencies migrated en masse to platforms like GovCMS — the whole-of-government content management system maintained by Salsa Digital under a Department of Finance contract — and the ACT's own SiteCore-based environments. Staff uploading images to those systems frequently had no way to search whether a photo already existed in the library. The path of least resistance was a fresh upload. A Canberra CBD street photo taken outside the Civic interchange on Alinga Street might exist in forty-three slightly different crop sizes across a single agency's media library, each linked to a different page, none of them talking to the others.

Public service churn amplified the issue. In suburbs like Gungahlin and Belconnen, where the ACT government has been rolling out new community facilities and updating planning communications, local office teams often managed their own web content in isolation from central digital units. When staff turned over — and in the ACT public service, machinery-of-government changes in 2022 and again in 2024 reshuffled dozens of directorates — institutional knowledge about existing image assets walked out the door with departing employees.

The Australian National University's Digital Collections team documented a parallel problem in its own repository in 2023, noting that duplicated image metadata was degrading search results across its library catalogue. The University of Canberra's library systems faced similar auditing backlogs. Neither institution is unique; the pattern is structural.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage alone does not explain the urgency. The more consequential damage is to accessibility compliance. When the same image exists under multiple filenames with inconsistent or missing alt-text descriptions, automated accessibility audits flag each instance separately. Agencies managing sites on GovCMS have reported audit queues running into the hundreds of individual accessibility failures, a significant portion of which trace back to duplicated assets carrying incomplete metadata rather than genuinely new content problems.

Page performance is a related casualty. A 2025 review of government website benchmarks by the Digital Transformation Agency found that slow-loading pages correlated strongly with unmanaged media libraries — though the precise figures for ACT-specific sites were not publicly broken down in that document.

The practical remedy is neither glamorous nor cheap. Duplicate image replacement requires a combination of hash-matching software to identify identical or near-identical files, manual editorial review to choose the canonical version, bulk re-linking of all pages that reference the discarded duplicates, and retroactive alt-text auditing on whatever survives. For a mid-sized agency website, that process typically runs over several months and demands dedicated resourcing that many teams inside the ACT government's digital units on London Circuit in Civic simply have not had available.

Several directorates are now bundling the image audit into broader website consolidation work tied to the ACT government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028. Teams working on the project have been advised to prioritise pages with the highest public traffic first — service pages linked from Access Canberra's main portal — before moving to archival content. For public servants and residents who rely on those sites for planning information, permit forms or transport updates, the practical outcome should be faster, more reliably accessible pages. Getting there has required acknowledging, first, how the mess accumulated in the first place.