By the Numbers: Melbourne's Duplicate Image Problem Is Costing Councils and Creatives More Than They Realise

Melbourne's public sector and creative industries are sitting on a sprawling mess of duplicated digital images — and the bill for storing them is growing. Across Victorian government agencies, local councils and arts bodies, duplicate image files are estimated to account for between 20 and 40 per cent of total digital storage use, according to data governance research published by the Australian Computer Society in 2024. That means institutions are routinely paying to store the same photograph, graphic or scanned document two, three, sometimes a dozen times over.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 because the Victorian Government's Digital Assets Policy, which came into effect in January, now requires all state agencies and local councils to conduct annual digital asset audits. For many organisations, this is the first time anyone has formally counted what they actually hold — and the numbers are uncomfortable.

What the Audits Are Turning Up

City of Melbourne and the City of Yarra are among councils that have moved to centralised digital asset management systems in the past 18 months. The rationale in both cases was partly about compliance and partly about cutting cloud storage costs, which have risen sharply as organisations migrated away from on-premise servers during the post-pandemic years. Cloud storage pricing from major Australian providers now typically runs between $0.023 and $0.025 per gigabyte per month — small numbers on paper, but significant when a mid-sized council's image library runs into the hundreds of thousands of files.

Arts organisations along Fitzroy's Smith Street and in the Melbourne Arts Precinct on St Kilda Road have faced a parallel version of this problem. Photographic archives documenting performances, exhibitions and community events are often uploaded by multiple staff members across different departments, with no single source of truth. A single opening-night image from a Malthouse Theatre production, for example, might exist in six different folders across two shared drives and a cloud backup — each slightly differently named, none of them flagged as a duplicate.

The Australian Library and Information Association flagged in its 2025 sector survey that arts and cultural organisations with fewer than 50 staff were the least likely to have formal deduplication processes in place. The same survey found that 63 per cent of respondents had never run a systematic duplicate-detection audit on their image holdings.

Why Deduplication Is Harder Than It Sounds

The technical fix — running deduplication software across a library — is straightforward enough. Tools like Gemini (for Mac environments) or open-source options such as dupeGuru can identify near-identical files within hours. The harder problem is institutional: who owns the decision to delete, and what counts as a true duplicate versus a legitimately different version?

A photograph cropped for a social media post and the same image at full resolution are technically different files. So are two scans of the same council document made at different DPI settings. Without a clear taxonomy — a decision tree that staff can follow — even a completed audit can leave organisations paralysed over what to actually remove.

The Victorian Public Records Office published updated guidance on digital records retention in March 2026, which explicitly addresses image file management for the first time. The guidance recommends councils designate a single authoritative copy of each image asset and establish metadata standards before any deletion takes place. It stops short of mandating specific software, leaving procurement decisions to individual agencies.

For organisations working through this now, the practical sequence matters. An audit first, then a metadata clean-up, then deduplication — done in the wrong order, institutions risk deleting files that still have live links on public websites or in grant acquittal documents. Several RMIT University library science graduates have found work this year helping inner-Melbourne councils and arts bodies work through exactly this sequencing, according to the university's 2026 graduate employment report. The Victorian Digital Jobs program, which funds short-term specialist placements in public agencies, lists records and digital asset management as a priority skill area for the current financial year. The numbers behind the duplicate image problem are, finally, getting the attention they deserve.