How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up With an Image Duplication Problem — and What It Will Cost to Fix It

Canberra's sprawling public service has a surprisingly unglamorous problem buried inside its digital infrastructure: thousands of duplicate images sitting across departmental servers, SharePoint libraries and content management systems, creating storage waste, licensing headaches and, in some cases, genuine legal exposure over image rights.

The issue didn't emerge overnight. It is the accumulated result of more than a decade of agencies building their own digital publishing operations — often independently, often quickly, and rarely in coordination with neighbouring departments sharing the same Russell Drive or Northbourne Avenue precinct.

Understanding why this matters now requires a look at where those decisions were made and how the Commonwealth's approach to digital content licensing has shifted since roughly 2018, when several major agencies began moving their intranet and public-facing sites onto centralised platforms under the Digital Transformation Agency's govCMS program. That migration exposed, for the first time at scale, just how many teams had been purchasing or downloading the same images separately.

A Problem Built Procurement Decision by Procurement Decision

The Australian Public Service employs roughly 170,000 people across the country, with the largest concentration in Canberra — in offices from Barton to Belconnen, from the Department of Finance's Treasury-adjacent buildings to the sprawling health portfolio agencies in Woden. Each of those offices, over the years, developed its own communications teams. Each communications team bought stock image subscriptions. Many bought from the same vendors — Shutterstock and Getty Images being the dominant two — but on separate contracts, negotiated separately, with separate download histories no one was comparing.

GovCMS, administered by the Digital Transformation Agency from its Canberra base on Constitution Avenue, began consolidating public-facing websites in earnest from around 2019. By 2022, more than 60 federal government websites were running on the platform. When agencies migrated their content, they brought their image libraries with them — duplicates and all.

The ACT government ran into an adjacent version of the same issue. The Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, which oversees the territory's digital services, flagged image management as part of a broader digital asset audit in 2024. Territory agencies running services from the Civic-based Access Canberra shopfronts to the Gungahlin Community Hub had similarly accumulated overlapping image files across years of separate website refreshes.

The Licensing Exposure Nobody Planned For

Duplicate images aren't just a storage problem. They create a legal one. Stock image licences are typically tied to a specific subscriber account and a specific use case — a web banner, a printed brochure, a social media post. When the same image appears under two different agency accounts or gets repurposed beyond its original licence scope during a website migration, that can constitute a breach of the supplier's terms.

Getty Images revised its government licensing terms in 2023, tightening language around sub-licensing and republication. That change put any agency that had migrated image files between platforms without re-clearing rights on uncertain ground.

The Australian National Audit Office noted in its 2024-25 work program a broader interest in digital asset management across Commonwealth entities, though no specific audit targeting image licensing has been tabled as of this week.

For agencies now trying to remediate the problem, the costs add up fast. A single enterprise licence for a major stock library can run between $15,000 and $80,000 annually depending on seat count and usage tier. Multiply that across a dozen agencies that could theoretically consolidate into one whole-of-government agreement, and the potential saving is significant — but so is the project cost of auditing, deduplicating and re-tagging tens of thousands of files before any consolidation can happen.

The Digital Transformation Agency has been working with agencies on shared procurement frameworks, and the approach taken through the govCMS platform suggests central coordination is the direction of travel. For ACT government teams, the territory's ICT procurement rules encourage aggregated purchasing, though implementation varies widely between directorates.

For communications staff across Canberra's public service — from the Department of Home Affairs in Belconnen to the smaller statutory bodies clustered around Forrest — the practical advice is the same: before the next website refresh or intranet migration, audit what images you actually hold, where they came from, and whether the licence still covers the use. The cost of doing that work now is almost certainly lower than the cost of doing it after a supplier sends a compliance notice.