Canberra's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Cities Tackling the Same Digital Headache

The ACT government's digital services division is working through a backlog of duplicate and outdated images embedded across agency websites, a problem that has quietly grown alongside years of rapid content migration and multiple platform overhauls. The issue is not unique to Canberra, but the way the territory is handling it — through a centralised content audit tied to the whole-of-government GovCMS platform — puts it ahead of some comparable capitals and behind others.

The timing matters. Federal agencies headquartered along Northbourne Avenue and in Barton are in the middle of a broader digital accessibility push linked to the Australian Government's Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy, which sets compliance benchmarks for public-sector websites. Duplicate images — particularly those lacking proper alt-text metadata — count against accessibility scores. Cleaning up those files is no longer just a housekeeping exercise; it has compliance consequences.

What Canberra Is Actually Doing

The ACT's digital services team, sitting within the Chief Minister, Treasury and Cabinet Directorate in the CBD, began a structured duplicate-image audit across ACT Government websites in early 2026. The program is running through GovCMS, the Drupal-based platform that hosts most Commonwealth and territory government websites and is managed federally by the Digital Transformation Agency. Under that system, content editors across ACT Health, Transport Canberra, and Access Canberra have been issued guidance on identifying and replacing repeat image assets before the end of the 2025–26 financial year.

The University of Canberra's News and Media Research Centre, based on the Kirinari Street campus in Bruce, has separately been studying how government digital teams manage visual content at scale. Researchers there have pointed to the organisational complexity that makes duplicate images so persistent: content teams turn over, platforms migrate, and image libraries rarely follow clean rules. Canberra's public service workforce, which cycles through roles at a pace uncommon in most cities, amplifies that churn.

Transport Canberra's website, which covers light rail, buses and active travel corridors including the Stage 2A extension to Commonwealth Park, was among the first ACT agency sites to undergo an image library consolidation under the audit. The agency's digital team reduced its active image asset count as part of a content refresh ahead of the Stage 2A communications rollout.

How Other Cities Compare

Wellington, New Zealand — a close comparator given its size, public-service dominance and GovCMS-adjacent infrastructure — completed a government-wide digital asset management review in 2024 through its Department of Internal Affairs. Wellington centralised image hosting across 43 agency websites into a single digital asset management system, cutting reported duplicate image files by roughly 34 percent in the first six months, according to New Zealand government published reporting from that review.

Ottawa, Canada, faces a structurally similar challenge but has moved more slowly. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat's digital standards framework flags duplicate content as a known risk but does not yet mandate active image audits across departments. Brussels, managing EU institutional websites across multiple language domains, has a different problem entirely — images are frequently duplicated deliberately across language versions, making automated deduplication tools unreliable without manual review.

Edinburgh's devolved government websites, running on a platform called Scotgov, implemented automated duplicate-detection tooling in late 2025 through a procurement worth approximately £180,000 over two years. Canberra has not publicly committed to a comparable automated tooling spend, instead relying on manual audit processes supported by GovCMS's native media library functions.

For Canberrans who work in or with government digital teams — a significant share of residents in suburbs like Downer, Hackett and Reid — the practical upshot is that agency websites should load faster and present fewer broken or mismatched images as the audit progresses. For public servants updating content, the advice from the directorate is straightforward: before uploading any new image to a GovCMS site, search the media library first. The duplicate problem largely self-replicates when that step is skipped. The ACT audit is scheduled to conclude its first full reporting cycle in September 2026, at which point the directorate is expected to release updated guidance based on what the audit found.