How Canberra's public agencies quietly built a duplicate image problem — and why fixing it now costs more than it should

The ACT Government's digital services directorate began a formal audit of image assets across territory-managed websites in March 2026, a move that drew little fanfare but has since exposed a structural problem that accumulated over more than a decade of piecemeal web migration. The core finding: duplicate and mismatched images — the same photograph filed under different names, cropped differently, or resized and re-uploaded without retiring the original — now clog content management systems across dozens of government portals.

The timing matters. The ACT is mid-way through consolidating its public-facing digital infrastructure under the Access Canberra service delivery model, with several legacy sites from the pre-2016 directorate restructure still carrying content that was never properly rationalised. At the same time, federal agencies concentrated along Constitution Avenue and in the Barton precinct are under pressure from the Australian Public Service Commission's digital capability framework — updated in January 2026 — to demonstrate cleaner data governance before the next capability review cycle.

How the backlog built up

The problem is not unique to Canberra, but the city's concentration of government websites made it worse here than almost anywhere else in the country. When agencies migrated from older Content Management Systems — many running on versions of Drupal or SharePoint that pre-dated 2015 — they typically exported image libraries in bulk rather than auditing them file by file. A photograph of the Civic bus interchange, for instance, might exist in an agency's media library under four different filenames, two different aspect ratios, and at least one version with an expired Creative Commons licence that was never flagged.

The Australian National University's 3A Institute, which has done work on responsible technology governance, published a discussion paper in late 2024 noting that public sector content systems routinely carry image duplication rates above 30 percent in large migration cohorts. That figure has been cited internally by at least one ACT directorate as a benchmark for assessing their own exposure, though the territory has not yet published its own audit results publicly.

The practical consequences are not trivial. Duplicate images inflate storage costs, slow page-load times — a measurable accessibility issue under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 standard that federal agencies are required to meet — and create compliance headaches when images carry embedded metadata that conflicts across versions. At Service NSW offices and their ACT equivalents on Mort Street in Braddon, front-counter staff have reported confusion when online form guides display photographs that no longer reflect current signage or layouts inside the building.

What a fix actually looks like

Replacing duplicate images is not simply a matter of deleting files. Each image embedded in a government page may be referenced in multiple places — a news release, a policy document landing page, an archived media gallery — and removing a file without tracing every reference risks breaking links across dozens of interconnected pages. Specialist digital asset management tools, including platforms like Bynder and Cloudinary that several Commonwealth agencies trialled in 2024-25, can automate much of this tracing work, but licensing costs for a mid-sized agency typically run between $40,000 and $120,000 per year depending on asset volume.

For smaller ACT bodies — community service directorates, the City Renewal Authority managing the Northbourne Avenue corridor redevelopment, or the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate — that price point is not trivial against a constrained capital works and IT budget.

The most practical path forward, according to the ACT Government's own Digital Strategy 2025-2028 framework, is a staged deduplication process tied to each agency's next scheduled content refresh cycle rather than a one-off system-wide purge. That means some legacy duplicates will persist for another two to three years. Agencies are being advised to at minimum tag and suppress outdated images from public display now, even if full deletion awaits the next migration round. For public servants managing content in Gungahlin or Belconnen service centres, that means a manual review of any image uploaded before July 2022 — a small task per page, but a substantial one across hundreds of active portals.