How Canberra's Government Agencies Got Buried Under Duplicate Digital Images — And What's Driving the Push to Fix It

The problem did not arrive overnight. Across Canberra's dense cluster of federal departments and ACT government offices — from the glass towers along Northbourne Avenue to the older Commonwealth blocks in Barton and Parkes — digital asset libraries have quietly swelled with duplicate images for the better part of ten years, the predictable consequence of how agencies approached digitisation in the first place.

Duplicate image replacement is now a live operational priority for a range of public sector bodies in the territory. The immediate trigger is storage cost: cloud and on-premises server contracts are renewing at materially higher rates in 2026, and chief information officers who once tolerated redundant files are under pressure from finance teams to justify every gigabyte. But the roots of the problem stretch back much further.

How the Duplication Accumulated

The ACT Government's digital records expansion accelerated sharply after the 2016 Digital Canberra Action Plan committed agencies to shifting core services online. Individual directorates — Health, Transport Canberra, Planning — each built their own content management systems on different platforms, with limited cross-agency coordination. The same photographs of light rail infrastructure along Flemington Road, the same aerial shots of the Gungahlin town centre, and the same headshots of ministers ended up stored independently in multiple repositories, each labelled differently and each counted separately in storage audits.

At the federal level, the pattern repeated at larger scale. The Australian Public Service Commission's Workforce Profile data has consistently shown that Canberra houses well over 150,000 federal public servants, many of them in agencies with their own digital communications teams producing overlapping visual content. When the Department of Finance pushed agencies toward the whole-of-government Whole of Australian Government Cloud Services Panel arrangements from 2017 onward, migration teams prioritised speed. Files were copied rather than rationalised, and duplicates came along for the ride.

By the early 2020s, the National Library of Australia's digital preservation teams and the National Archives on Queen Victoria Terrace were separately grappling with the same question: which version of a scanned or photographed document was the authoritative one, and which were copies that could safely be retired? Neither institution has publicly disclosed the scale of redundancy in its holdings, but the challenge is well understood among digital records professionals in the territory.

The Cost Calculation That Changed Minds

What finally turned duplicate image management from a background nuisance into a funded project was arithmetic. Cloud storage pricing — particularly under the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services arrangements that underpin much of the federal government's infrastructure — did not fall as steeply after 2023 as procurement teams had forecast. Agencies that had deferred clean-up on the assumption that storage would keep getting cheaper found the logic had inverted.

The ACT Government's Shared Services ICT division, based in Callam Offices in Woden, began piloting automated deduplication tools across selected directorates in late 2025 as part of a broader data hygiene program. The approach relies on perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually similar images even when file names, formats or metadata differ — rather than simple byte-for-byte comparison, which misses the most common category of duplicate: the same photograph saved at different resolutions or with minor crops applied.

For agencies in the growth suburbs, the pressure is particularly acute. Rapid development in Belconnen and Gungahlin has generated large volumes of planning, construction and community engagement photography over the past five years, much of it collected by multiple teams attending the same site visits and stored independently.

For public servants and communications staff working through the problem now, the practical pathway runs through several steps: audit existing repositories using hashing tools before any new cloud contract renewal, establish a single source-of-truth library with clear naming conventions, and assign ownership of the rationalisation process to a named role rather than leaving it to individual teams. Agencies that have already begun the process report the initial audit phase alone — identifying what exists and where — typically takes longer than expected, making early starts essential before the next round of storage contract negotiations, most of which fall due in the 2026–27 financial year.