How Melbourne's Councils Ended Up Paying Twice for the Same Stock Photos

At least a dozen Victorian local councils and state government agencies have been paying separate licensing fees for identical stock images, sometimes sourced from the same supplier within months of each other. The problem — known in digital asset management circles as duplicate image replacement — has quietly accumulated across government websites, internal intranets and public-facing publications, costing ratepayers money that auditors say could have been avoided with basic coordination.

The issue matters now because the Allan government's push to consolidate digital services under the Victorian Government's Service Victoria platform has brought the duplication into sharper relief. As agencies migrate legacy content onto shared infrastructure, IT teams are finding the same Getty Images or Shutterstock files licensed under multiple contract numbers, sometimes by departments sitting in the same building on Collins Street.

How the Duplication Accumulated

The roots go back to the early 2010s, when individual agencies began building their own web presences largely without central coordination. The City of Melbourne, Yarra City Council and agencies like VicRoads each maintained separate digital procurement pipelines. Stock image subscriptions were treated as minor operational expenses — below the threshold for formal tender — which meant no one was tracking what had already been bought across the broader public sector.

By 2018, the Victorian Auditor-General's Office had flagged fragmented ICT procurement as a recurring risk in its annual reports, but digital asset libraries were not specifically examined. The problem compounded through the pandemic years, when teams working remotely downloaded and re-licensed images without access to shared drives. The state government's digital communications workforce grew rapidly between 2020 and 2022 as agencies stood up new public-health web pages, often under deadline pressure that left no time to cross-check existing libraries.

Inner-city agencies were not the only ones affected. Councils in Melbourne's outer southeast — including Casey City Council, which covers suburbs from Cranbourne to Narre Warren — built substantial image libraries independently of neighbouring Cardinia Shire. Both councils, according to publicly available contract registers, held active subscriptions to major stock platforms simultaneously, with overlapping image categories covering infrastructure, multicultural communities and open space.

The Cost of Not Sharing

Stock image subscriptions at the enterprise level typically run between $3,000 and $15,000 annually depending on usage tiers, according to published pricing from platforms including Adobe Stock and iStock. Multiply that across 79 Victorian councils plus dozens of state agencies, and even partial duplication represents a material budget line — particularly for smaller rural councils operating on thin margins.

The state government's Digital Assets Policy, updated in March 2025, now requires agencies onboarding to Service Victoria's shared hosting environment to conduct a duplicate-image audit before migrating content. The policy does not apply retrospectively to existing sites, meaning years of accumulated duplication remains embedded in legacy systems. Practitioners at organisations including the Design and Technology Standards unit within the Department of Government Services have been working through those backlogs since late 2025.

Creative agencies contracted to Melbourne's cultural institutions have also encountered the problem. The Australian Centre for the Moving Image on Federation Square and the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road both maintain large digital asset libraries for marketing and exhibition use. Both institutions declined to comment on their specific licensing arrangements, but industry sources familiar with the sector say that arts organisations face the same structural pressures as government: decentralised teams, rapid content cycles and a historical preference for individual subscriptions over enterprise-wide agreements.

The practical path forward is not complicated, though it requires discipline. Agencies migrating content are being advised to run image files through perceptual hash tools — software that identifies visually identical images regardless of filename — before finalising new licensing agreements. The Department of Government Services has published a technical guide on its website covering this process. For councils not yet subject to the state's shared-platform requirements, the Victorian Local Governance Association has flagged the issue as an agenda item for its next digital working group, scheduled for August 2026 in the Melbourne CBD. That meeting may be the most consequential conversation local government has had about stock photos in a long time.