How Canberra's Government Agencies Got Buried Under a Mountain of Duplicate Digital Images — and Why It Now Costs Real Money

Somewhere on a shared server inside a Canberra government building — most likely somewhere between Civic and Barton — the same photograph of Parliament House has been saved, renamed, re-exported and re-uploaded several hundred times. Multiply that across dozens of agencies, two decades of digital transition, and multiple waves of machinery-of-government changes, and the scale of the duplication problem facing the ACT and federal public service starts to come into focus.

The issue of duplicate image replacement — identifying redundant digital assets, removing or consolidating them, and establishing clean master libraries — has quietly moved up the agenda for digital teams across Canberra this year. It is not a glamorous policy problem. It does not generate press conferences. But the administrative costs it generates, and the compliance risks it creates under the Australian Government's Digital Continuity 2020 policy framework, have made it impossible to ignore any longer.

How the pile got this high

The roots of the problem run back to roughly 2005 and 2006, when Commonwealth agencies began mass digitisation of print archives and simultaneous adoption of early content management systems. Staff working across platforms — Windows file shares, early SharePoint deployments, agency-specific databases — routinely saved local copies of images to avoid slow network retrieval times. The habit stuck. Each successive technology refresh, including the large-scale cloud migrations that accelerated after the Australian Government's Cloud First policy took effect from 2014, moved files forward without cleaning them up first. Duplicates followed duplicates into the new environment.

At the ACT government level, agencies operating from offices along Northbourne Avenue and in the Canberra Nara Centre dealt with a parallel version of the same pattern. Staff turnover — always high in a city where contract cycles are short and departmental restructures are frequent — meant institutional memory about where master images actually lived eroded steadily. The ACT Digital Strategy, released in 2021, acknowledged data governance as a priority but set no binding targets for legacy duplication remediation.

By the time organisations began seriously auditing their digital asset holdings in 2024 and 2025, the numbers were striking. Industry estimates, published by the International Association of Records Managers and Administrators in 2024, suggest that between 25 and 40 per cent of files stored in typical government digital repositories are redundant, obsolete or trivial — a category that includes duplicate images. Cloud storage is not free. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services both charge on a per-gigabyte basis, and large ACT government contracts for cloud infrastructure have been publicly reported as running into the tens of millions of dollars annually, meaning even modest reductions in stored junk translate to measurable savings.

What the clean-up actually looks like

The practical work of duplicate image replacement involves more than running a deduplication script. Agencies must first establish which copy is the authoritative master — a question complicated by the fact that images are often cropped, colour-corrected or resized for different platforms, producing files that are similar but not technically identical. The Australian National University's digital collections team, which manages research image assets for multiple faculties, has been working through this problem since late 2023 using a combination of perceptual hashing tools and manual review. The University of Canberra's library services division has undertaken comparable work on its archival photograph holdings.

For Commonwealth agencies, the National Archives of Australia sets the baseline standard through its Digital Preservation Policy, last updated in 2022. That policy requires agencies to maintain authentic, reliable and usable records — a requirement that duplicate sprawl directly undermines, particularly when different versions of the same image have accumulated different metadata or access permissions over time.

The practical advice for public servants managing image libraries right now is straightforward: before any agency undertakes a platform migration or a website rebuild — and several ACT government sites are scheduled for redevelopment before the end of the 2026-27 financial year — a deduplication audit should precede the move, not follow it. Moving duplicate assets into a new system costs money twice: once to migrate them and once to sort out the mess afterward. Canberra learned that lesson slowly. The agencies still in the middle of it are hoping not to learn it a third time.