How Canberra's Government Agencies Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What They're Doing About It

It didn't happen overnight. Across dozens of ACT government websites, internal SharePoint libraries, and the federal agencies concentrated along Northbourne Avenue and in the Barton precinct, the same photographs have been saved, re-saved, renamed, and uploaded again — sometimes hundreds of times over. The problem has a name now: duplicate image replacement, a systematic audit-and-cull process that several agencies have quietly begun rolling out across their digital asset stores this year.

The timing matters. The ACT government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, which set benchmarks for streamlining government digital infrastructure, put pressure on agencies to clean house before the next budget cycle. For a city where the public service is not just an employer but the defining economic fact of life — roughly one in three Canberrans works directly or indirectly for a level of government — the administrative overhead of managing bloated media libraries is not a trivial cost.

How the Clutter Accumulated

The root cause is structural. When the ACT government accelerated its digital communications push in the early 2010s, individual directorates built their own content pipelines with little central coordination. Transport Canberra, for instance, accumulated years of Light Rail construction photography separately from the broader infrastructure communications team. Community services agencies photographed the same Gungahlin community hubs and Belconnen Arts Centre events repeatedly, with each team storing its own copies in its own folder hierarchy.

The Commonwealth side of the problem is, if anything, larger. The cluster of departments housed in the John Gorton Building on King Edward Terrace and along the Parkes Way corridor each maintained independent digital asset management systems through the 2010s. When the Australian Public Service Commission pushed for shared services consolidation — a process that accelerated after the Thodey Review recommendations landed in 2019 — the merging of previously siloed photo libraries exposed the scale of duplication for the first time.

By some estimates circulating in digital asset management circles, a mid-sized federal agency might hold three to five copies of any given image taken at a Canberra press conference or departmental event. Multiply that across scores of agencies and tens of thousands of images, and storage costs become meaningful. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure both price cloud storage at a granular per-gigabyte rate, and large agencies can carry image libraries running into the terabytes.

What the Audit Process Actually Involves

Duplicate image replacement is not simply deleting files. The process involves running perceptual hashing algorithms across an image library — tools that can identify visually identical or near-identical photographs even when they've been resized, recompressed, or given different file names. A canonical version is designated, lower-quality or redundant copies are retired, and any live links pointing to the old files are redirected or updated. Done badly, it breaks web pages. Done well, it cuts both storage overhead and the time communications staff spend searching for approved images.

The Australian National University's Digital Humanities Hub on Acton Peninsula has been involved in advising on similar processes for research image archives, and the University of Canberra's Institute for Communication in Health Care has dealt with comparable challenges managing patient-education visual content. Neither institution is immune to the broader problem that afflicts any large organisation that has been producing digital content for more than a decade.

For ACT government agencies, the practical stakes are grounded in the web publishing environment. The whole-of-government website platform, which consolidates content from directorates ranging from Transport Canberra to the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, cannot function cleanly when the same image exists under six different URLs.

Agencies currently working through the process are being advised to complete initial audits before the end of the 2026 calendar year, ahead of a planned refresh of the whole-of-government content management system scheduled for early 2027. Communications teams that have already completed the first pass report that the practical benefit is immediate — search times for approved imagery drop sharply, and the risk of accidentally publishing an outdated, uncaptioned, or rights-unclear photograph decreases. It is unglamorous work. But for a public service city built on documentation and process, getting the foundations right tends to matter more than it looks from the outside.