Melbourne Leads the Pack on Duplicate Image Replacement — But Other Cities Are Closing the Gap

Melbourne's major public institutions have moved faster than most global peers to systematically identify and replace duplicate images in their digital archives, but a widening field of competitors — from Amsterdam to Toronto — is now challenging that lead with dedicated funding and specialist teams that Victoria's equivalents are still assembling.

The issue has grown sharper in 2026 as digitisation programs funded under the previous federal Cultural Infrastructure grants round begin to mature. Collections that were scanned rapidly during COVID-era remote-access pushes are now riddled with redundant files: identical photographs catalogued under different accession numbers, the same architectural drawings stored in multiple formats, event photography duplicated across council hard drives and public-facing portals. The cost is not just aesthetic. Duplicate image libraries inflate storage bills, slow search results for researchers, and — in the case of councils using visual records for planning and heritage decisions — can introduce real errors into official processes.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne's Smart City Office has been piloting an automated deduplication tool across the council's asset photography database since February 2026, targeting roughly 400,000 images held across internal servers on Swanston Street. The program uses perceptual hashing — a technique that detects near-identical images even when file names, formats or metadata differ — rather than simple checksum matching, which misses the vast majority of real-world duplicates. A council spokesperson confirmed the pilot in March but did not release figures on how many duplicates had been identified by that date.

State Library Victoria, on La Trobe Street in the CBD, has been running a parallel effort through its Digital Collections unit. The library holds more than 1.5 million digitised items, and its internal technical documentation — published on its website — describes a 2025-26 project to audit image duplication across the Pictorial Collection specifically. The library is also a member of the Digital Library Federation, a US-based consortium that published benchmark guidance on deduplication workflows in late 2024, giving Victorian institutions a practical framework to work from.

Arts Centre Melbourne, meanwhile, has acknowledged publicly that its performing arts archive — one of the most photographed in the southern hemisphere, spanning productions at the Hamer Hall and the Theatres building — requires significant deduplication work before it can be fully integrated into the National Library of Australia's Trove platform. No completion date has been given.

How Melbourne Compares Globally

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum completed a full deduplication audit of its 1.1-million-item online collection by December 2024, according to the museum's own annual report, reducing its publicly accessible image set by roughly 12 percent after redundant scans were removed or merged. That project ran over 18 months and was staffed by a four-person specialist unit funded through the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

Toronto Public Library launched a city-wide digital records deduplication initiative in January 2025 covering municipal photography archives dating to 1954. The library has publicly stated the project is expected to run until mid-2027. Singapore's National Heritage Board, by contrast, completed a phased deduplication of its online image portal in 2023 and now publishes an annual data quality report — a level of public accountability that no major Melbourne institution currently matches.

Melbourne's advantage is genuine in one respect: the Smart City Office's use of perceptual hashing is technically more sophisticated than the simple filename-matching approaches still in use at several comparable European city councils. The disadvantage is resourcing. Amsterdam's dedicated team and Singapore's structured reporting cycle both reflect sustained political commitment to the work that Melbourne's institutions, reliant on project-by-project grants, have not yet locked in.

For researchers, heritage practitioners and anyone navigating Trove or the City of Melbourne's open data portal, the practical upshot is straightforward: treat any image search in these systems as potentially returning redundant results, and verify accession numbers before relying on a single record for planning, legal or publication purposes. Institutions are improving, but the clean archive is still a work in progress — and the cities getting there fastest are the ones that budgeted for it as infrastructure, not as a side project.