How Canberra's government agencies ended up drowning in duplicate images — and what it's costing them

The problem didn't appear overnight. Across Civic, Barton, and the inner-north precinct where much of the federal public service is concentrated, government communications teams have spent years uploading, re-uploading, and re-naming the same stock photographs, event images, and aerial shots of Lake Burley Griffin — storing them across incompatible systems with no mechanism to flag what already existed. The result is digital asset libraries so cluttered with duplicates that agencies are now spending measurable staff hours each week simply trying to find usable files.

The issue matters now because several major ACT government digital programs are converging at once. The territory's ServiceACT portal modernisation, which has been rolling through stages since 2023, requires a unified image library. So does the refresh of the ACT Government's Digital Canberra Action Plan, which sets benchmarks for how public-facing websites are managed and audited. Cleaning up duplicate images is not a cosmetic task — it affects page-load speeds, accessibility compliance under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 standard, and the accuracy of content audits that underpin Freedom of Information responses.

How the duplication built up

Three structural factors drove the problem. First, machinery-of-government changes between 2019 and 2022 reshuffled at least a dozen federal agencies headquartered in Canberra, each migration moving shared drives, intranets, and content management systems without systematic deduplication. Second, the COVID-19 shift to remote work accelerated the use of consumer-grade file-sharing tools — OneDrive folders and personal Google Drive accounts — by communications staff working from Gungahlin townhouses and Belconnen apartments, creating shadow libraries outside official repositories. Third, the ACT government's own Content Hub, managed through the Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate, was never mandated as the single point of upload for imagery used across directorates, so parallel collections accumulated inside Transport Canberra, Canberra Health Services, and the Education Directorate independently.

The Australian National University's digital humanities team documented a related phenomenon in a 2024 working paper examining public-sector web archives: content repositories inside mid-sized government entities commonly carry duplication rates of between 30 and 60 per cent by file count once image assets are included. The ANU study did not assess ACT or federal agencies directly, but the finding has been cited in internal briefings prepared for the ACT's Chief Digital Officer — briefings that have since been released in part under FOI. The University of Canberra's Centre for Creative and Cultural Research has separately flagged the archival risk: when duplicates are purged without proper auditing, original provenance metadata — who took the photograph, when, and under what licence — can be lost permanently.

What duplicate-image replacement actually involves

Replacing duplicate images is not as simple as running a delete script. Agencies must first reconcile file hashes to identify true duplicates versus near-duplicates — images cropped or resized from a common original. They then need to confirm which version carries the correct licensing metadata, replace embedded references across CMS pages, and update any hardcoded image paths in legacy HTML. For a directorate maintaining several hundred web pages, that process can run to weeks of work. The ACT Government's contract panel for digital services, updated in March 2025, includes specific line items for content remediation of this kind, with hourly rates for specialist content migration work sitting between $145 and $195 depending on supplier tier.

The practical path forward involves three steps that agencies are already beginning to take. Directorates are being encouraged to adopt perceptual hashing tools — software that identifies visually similar images even when file names differ — before any new content migration begins. The National Archives of Australia, whose main facility sits on Dickson's Timestep Drive precinct, has updated its digital records guidance to require deduplication logs as part of any records disposal authority submission. And the ACT's Digital, Data and Technology Solutions directorate is understood to be piloting a shared Digital Asset Management system across two directorates before a broader rollout, with a decision on the preferred platform expected before the end of the 2026 calendar year. Getting that decision right matters: a botched migration could push the duplication problem further down the line rather than resolving it.