Melbourne Councils Waste Thousands Paying Twice for Identical Stock Photos

Melbourne City Council, Yarra City Council and at least a dozen other Victorian local governments have been quietly grappling with a shared administrative headache: duplicate images embedded across their public websites, planning documents and community communications, sometimes the same photograph purchased, licensed and stored multiple times across different departments. The problem has its roots not in negligence but in a decade of digital expansion without a unified content governance framework.

The issue matters now because Victoria's state government has pushed councils to accelerate their digital service delivery following the 2023 Local Government Digital Transformation Strategy. That push brought more teams online faster, economic development officers, planning units, arts and culture departments, each operating their own content workflows and drawing on stock image libraries independently. The result is fragmented digital estates where a single aerial photograph of the Hoddle Grid or a stock shot of Flinders Lane might exist in six separate folders across three servers, each carrying a separate licensing record.

How the Duplication Built Up

The mechanics are straightforward. Before cloud-based digital asset management became standard, council communications teams at places like the City of Port Phillip and Moreland City Council, now merged into Merri-bek City Council following the 2024 amalgamation, maintained their own local image folders on departmental drives. When staff turned over, institutional memory about what had already been licensed walked out the door with them. New officers, starting fresh, would license the same Getty Images or Shutterstock photograph their predecessor had already paid for. Some councils were paying annual subscription fees to multiple stock platforms simultaneously, with no single officer holding oversight of the full image inventory.

By the time the Victorian Auditor-General's Office began flagging digital asset governance as a recurring concern in its annual local government performance audits, a pattern evident in reports published between 2021 and 2024, the duplication problem had compounded. An internal review process at the City of Melbourne, initiated in late 2024 as part of its broader ICT consolidation project, reportedly identified hundreds of duplicate image files across its content management system. The council engaged a third-party digital audit firm to map the asset overlap before migrating to a centralised platform.

The financial stakes are real. Commercial stock image licences through platforms such as Adobe Stock or Shutterstock typically cost between $40 and $300 per image depending on usage rights, with enterprise subscriptions running into the tens of thousands of dollars annually for large organisations. For a mid-sized council purchasing images across five or six departments with no cross-referencing, the redundant spend over a three-to-four-year period can easily reach six figures, money that comes directly from rate revenue.

What Councils Are Now Being Advised to Do

The practical fix involves three steps that digital governance specialists have been recommending to Victorian councils throughout 2025 and into 2026. First, a full audit of existing image assets using deduplication software, tools that scan file metadata and pixel-level similarity rather than just file names, since the same photograph saved as both a JPEG and a PNG will not be caught by a simple filename search. Second, the consolidation of all licensed images into a single digital asset management system, with access controls tied to staff roles rather than individual logins. Third, a procurement policy that requires any image purchase above a set threshold, typically $50, to be checked against the existing asset library before approval.

The Victorian Local Governance Association has been running workshops on digital asset management at its Carlton-based offices since early 2026, drawing council communications officers and IT managers from across the metropolitan region. Councils in Melbourne's outer south-east, including the City of Casey and Cardinia Shire, have been among the more active participants, given their rapid population growth and correspondingly fast-expanding digital communications outputs.

For councils still in the early stages, the most immediate practical step is a freeze on new image procurement until a basic asset audit is complete. It is unglamorous administrative work. But after years of digital sprawl, it is how the duplication problem finally stops compounding.