How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What It Cost to Get Here

The ACT Government's Digital Canberra initiative is confronting a problem that has quietly compounded for more than a decade: thousands of duplicate images clogging agency content management systems, inflating storage costs and creating legal exposure over unclear licensing. The issue is not new, but the scale of it has only recently become visible as agencies consolidated platforms ahead of the 2025-26 federal budget cycle.

The immediate trigger was a cross-agency audit conducted through the Australian Government Information Management Office framework, which flagged that multiple departments sharing infrastructure under the Whole-of-Government ICT strategy were holding redundant visual files — in some cases the same photograph licensed separately by three or four different teams. Storage and rights management fees for unresolved duplicate assets run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually across the broader public service footprint in Canberra.

How the Backlog Built Up

The roots go back to 2015, when agencies accelerating their digital communications began purchasing stock imagery and commissioning original photography through department-level budgets rather than any central register. ServiceNow deployments and SharePoint migrations through 2018 and 2019 moved files between systems without deduplication checks. Then the pandemic hit. Between March 2020 and mid-2022, remote-working public servants at offices along Northbourne Avenue and Constitution Avenue were producing digital content at a rate that outpaced any coherent asset governance policy. Files were uploaded, renamed, reuploaded and forgotten.

ANU's 3A Institute, which has published work on data governance challenges in the public sector, has long flagged that asset management is treated as an afterthought in government digital transformation programs. The University of Canberra's Human Centred Technology Research Centre has similarly pointed to the gap between procurement policy and on-the-ground practice inside large bureaucracies. Neither institution was directly involved in the current audit, but their research sits squarely in the background of how agencies have started framing the problem.

At the National Archives of Australia on Queen Victoria Terrace in Parkes, staff have been navigating a version of this challenge for years — distinguishing original archival images from duplicates and near-duplicates across digitised collections that stretch back to the early twentieth century. The Archives formally adopted perceptual hashing tools for duplicate detection in its 2023-24 operational plan, a technical approach now being considered more broadly across ACT government digital asset libraries.

The Cost of Inaction

Storage is only part of the bill. The more significant risk is licensing. Image rights agreements — particularly those covering news photography and commercially licensed stock — typically restrict duplication and redistribution in ways that most department-level communications teams did not police closely when files were being transferred between SharePoint sites or uploaded to platforms like Squiz Matrix, which underpins a large portion of ACT government web publishing. A single mislicensed image reproduced across multiple agency pages can trigger a rights claim well above the original licensing fee.

The ACT Government's Digital Strategy 2025-2028, released last year, identifies asset rationalisation as a priority workstream. Under that strategy, agencies are expected to migrate to a central Digital Asset Management system by the end of the 2026 calendar year. The Gungahlin and Belconnen service centres, which generate significant volumes of community-facing digital content, are among the first sites flagged for the new system's rollout.

Practically, what this means for public servants working in communications and web roles is straightforward: teams are being asked to conduct local audits before the December 2026 migration deadline, flag images without clear provenance or licensing documentation, and stop purchasing stock imagery through individual departmental credit cards. A central procurement arrangement through the Digital Transformation Agency is expected to replace the current patchwork by the third quarter of this year.

The work is unglamorous. It involves spreadsheets, licensing PDFs and a lot of internal email. But the agencies that skip it will arrive at the migration deadline carrying legal and financial baggage that the new platform was not designed to absorb.