Melbourne Leads Australia in Purging Duplicate Public Art Images — But Lags Behind Amsterdam and Seoul

Melbourne City Council has been quietly overhauling the visual identity of its digital and physical civic infrastructure, replacing hundreds of duplicate or stock images across its website, community notice boards and public signage — a process that started in earnest in early 2025 and is now drawing comparisons with similar programs in Amsterdam, Seoul and Toronto.

The effort matters because cities globally are grappling with a specific, underreported problem: the saturation of identical royalty-free or recycled images across government platforms erodes public trust and makes civic communication look generic. When a council's homepage in Docklands shows the same skyline photograph as a housing authority brochure in Footscray, residents notice — and disengage.

Where Melbourne Stands

The Council's Creative City team, based at the Melbourne Town Hall on Swanston Street, has been working alongside Canva for Government — a program Canva formally launched for Australian local government customers in March 2025 — to build a library of locally commissioned images. The initiative draws on photography from the City of Melbourne's own archive program, which has catalogued more than 14,000 images of Melbourne neighbourhoods since 2019, covering everything from the laneways off Flinders Lane to community events in Brunswick and Collingwood.

The Victorian government's Digital Victoria unit, which sits within the Department of Government Services, has taken a parallel approach for state-level platforms, running an audit of imagery across Service Victoria's web properties that began in October 2025. State government documents obtained through a public access request show the audit identified more than 1,200 instances of duplicate or near-identical images across 34 agency websites, though the department has not publicly detailed what proportion have since been replaced.

Melbourne's push is further along than Sydney and Brisbane. Neither the City of Sydney nor Brisbane City Council has publicly documented a formal duplicate-image audit program as of July 2026. Sydney's council declined to comment for this story. Brisbane's communications team did not respond by deadline.

How Global Peers Compare

Amsterdam is the benchmark that civic design consultants keep citing. The City of Amsterdam's communications directorate completed a full visual identity overhaul in late 2024, replacing all templated stock imagery across its 60-plus departmental websites with a single commissioned photography library produced by Dutch cooperative Gemeente Beeld. The project took 18 months and cost approximately €2.1 million, according to the city's published 2024 annual budget report.

Seoul finished a comparable program under its Smart Seoul 2030 initiative in April 2026, replacing duplicate imagery on the city's 800-page civic portal. The Seoul Metropolitan Government published a case study noting the overhaul reduced page bounce rates on key landing pages by 18 per cent within two months of launch — the only independently verified performance figure attached to any of these programs reviewed for this article.

Toronto is further behind Melbourne, still working through phase one of a visual audit that began under the city's Digital Services office in February 2026. Canadian media reported the Toronto program is expected to take until mid-2027 to complete across all borough-level websites.

For Melbourne, the practical challenge is scale and cost. The council's current Canva for Government licence covers roughly 200 staff users and costs an amount the council lists as commercial-in-confidence. Extending bespoke photography to all of Melbourne's 31 suburbs covered by the City of Melbourne boundary — let alone the broader metropolitan area administered by 31 separate local councils — would require either a coordinated statewide procurement or a shift in how councils think about shared digital assets.

The Municipal Association of Victoria, which represents all 79 Victorian councils, circulated a discussion paper on shared digital asset frameworks to member councils in May 2026. The paper recommended a pilot involving between four and six inner-north councils — likely including Yarra, Moreland and Darebin — using a jointly commissioned image library. A decision on whether to proceed to tender is expected before the end of the 2026 calendar year.

For residents, the most visible short-term change is likely to show up on council notice boards and community newsletter headers around Fitzroy, Carlton and Kensington before it filters through to suburb-level signage. The broader digital overhaul is a slower process — but Melbourne, for once, is closer to the front of the queue than the back.