How Canberra's Government Websites Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — And What It Took to Get Here

Hundreds of duplicate images are embedded across ACT government websites, internal portals, and digital publications — the accumulated result of more than a decade of rushed content uploads, poor metadata standards, and repeated platform migrations that nobody fully resourced at the time. The problem is not new. What is new is that agencies are now being required to do something about it.

The push to systematically audit and replace duplicate digital assets has gained urgency in 2026 partly because the ACT government is mid-way through consolidating a clutch of legacy content management systems onto a unified platform. That migration, which affects agencies operating out of offices along London Circuit and in the Civic precinct, has exposed just how tangled the back-end image libraries have become. A single photograph of the Civic interchange or a stock shot of a public servant at a desk can appear in dozens of places under different file names, different alt-text descriptions, or no description at all.

How the Problem Accumulated

The roots go back to the mid-2010s, when ACT government agencies were largely left to build and manage their own web presences under broad whole-of-government guidelines but with limited central enforcement. The Digital Canberra Action Plan, first released in 2014, encouraged agencies to put services online quickly. Speed, not hygiene, was the priority. Images were uploaded without standard naming conventions. When agencies switched vendors or moved from one CMS version to another — events that happened repeatedly between 2016 and 2022 — image libraries were migrated in bulk rather than audited. Duplicates multiplied.

The Australian National University's digital accessibility research group has documented similar patterns across higher education and government institutions nationally, noting that bloated image libraries inflate page load times and create significant barriers for users relying on screen readers — particularly when duplicate files carry inconsistent or missing alternative text. ANU sits on Acton Peninsula, where its own web team undertook a comparable audit in 2023 after a formal accessibility review flagged hundreds of untagged images across faculty pages.

At the University of Canberra in Bruce, a comparable internal review completed in late 2024 found that the institution had accumulated image assets across three separate storage systems that had never been fully reconciled. Staff uploading content for the health faculty, for example, had no visibility over what the engineering or law faculties had already loaded into the shared library. The result was the same photograph appearing multiple times, often slightly cropped differently, with no consistent filename or attribution record.

What Agencies Are Now Being Asked to Do

The ACT government's Digital Strategy 2025-2030, which came into effect in January 2025, set accessibility and content quality benchmarks that agencies must meet on a rolling compliance schedule. Duplicate image replacement is now part of that framework. Agencies are being asked to run de-duplication checks, establish a canonical version of each image asset, and retire redundant files before they migrate content to the new shared platform.

The practical burden falls heavily on smaller directorates with limited in-house digital capacity. Teams working across Canberra's suburban service centres — including offices in Gungahlin and Belconnen — often rely on a single web officer managing content for an entire branch. For those staff, a manual image audit can mean weeks of work on top of existing duties. Several directorates are understood to be using third-party digital asset management tools, though procurement and implementation timelines vary.

The immediate practical advice from digital governance specialists is consistent: start with the highest-traffic pages first, prioritise images that lack alt-text entirely, and document every replacement decision so the audit trail is clear for future platform migrations. Canberra's next major CMS transition is currently pencilled in for late 2027, which gives agencies roughly 18 months to get their image libraries into a defensible state. That deadline is closer than it sounds.