How Melbourne's Council Websites Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What's Being Done to Fix It

Across Melbourne's network of local government websites, the same stock photograph of a Fitzroy streetscape has appeared on at least four separate council pages simultaneously. That single example sits at the heart of a broader audit now underway across Victorian public sector digital infrastructure, examining how years of ad hoc image uploads created a tangle of duplicated, outdated and unlicensed visual content that costs time, storage money and — in some cases — exposes agencies to copyright liability.

The issue matters right now because the Victorian Government's Digital Victoria program, operating under the Department of Government Services, set a June 2026 deadline for state-aligned agencies to demonstrate compliance with updated web content accessibility and asset-management standards. That deadline has now passed, and a number of Melbourne metropolitan councils are still working through remediation plans. The audit process has surfaced duplicate image replacement as one of the most time-consuming and underestimated tasks in the entire exercise.

How the Clutter Built Up

The problem did not happen overnight. It accumulated through more than a decade of content management system migrations, staff turnover, and the common practice of uploading a new image rather than finding and reusing one already in the system. When the City of Yarra moved from one content platform to another around 2018, administrators carried across the entire existing media library without deduplication. The City of Moreland — now merged into the City of Merri-bek — had a similar experience during its own CMS transition. Each time a new staff member joined a communications team, the path of least resistance was to upload fresh assets rather than navigate a poorly tagged archive.

By the time Victoria's Auditor-General's Office began flagging digital asset governance as a systemic risk in public sector reporting, individual councils had media libraries containing thousands of images, with duplication rates that internal reviews at several agencies found exceeded 30 percent of total stored files. Storage costs on government-contracted cloud platforms are typically billed per gigabyte per month, and while each individual file is small, libraries running into tens of thousands of assets across dozens of microsites add up quickly.

The licensing dimension sharpened attention further. Several councils discovered during internal reviews that images sourced from free-tier stock platforms — sites with time-limited or attribution-required licences — had been re-uploaded multiple times by different staff members, stripping the original filename metadata that would have flagged the licence terms. Without that metadata, there was no automated way to identify which images required attribution or had lapsed licensing. The City of Melbourne's digital team flagged this specific problem in a process review document circulated to inner-city council communications managers in late 2025.

What Remediation Actually Looks Like

Fixing duplicate images is less glamorous than it sounds. It typically means running deduplication software against a media library to generate a hash-matched report, then manually reviewing flagged pairs because automated tools cannot determine which version is the canonical one to keep. Teams at councils including those serving the Docklands and Southbank precincts — whose tourism-facing pages carry heavy image loads — have been working through queues of several hundred flagged duplicates at a time.

The practical cost is staff hours. A mid-sized council communications team of four to six people, dealing with a library of 8,000 images and a 30 percent duplication rate, faces roughly 2,400 individual decisions. At a conservative estimate of three minutes per decision — pull up both images, check metadata, check live page usage, delete and redirect — that is 120 hours of work, or three weeks for one full-time officer.

Digital Victoria has published guidance recommending councils adopt a single-source-of-truth media library integrated directly with their CMS, with mandatory alt-text and licence fields that cannot be left blank at upload. The advice is not binding on local government, but several councils have pointed to it in budget submissions for 2026-27, seeking funding to upgrade content management infrastructure. For residents, the visible result should eventually be faster-loading council pages and fewer broken image links — a modest but measurable improvement to the digital services millions of Melburnians use to pay rates, lodge permits and check bin collection schedules.