How Melbourne's Arts and Government Sectors Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What It's Costing Them

Victoria's public institutions are sitting on digital archives bloated with duplicate images — the same photograph filed under different names, stored across multiple servers, licensed more than once and occasionally purchased again from stock libraries at full price. The problem is not new, but it has reached a scale that is forcing a reckoning in mid-2026.

The reason this is landing on desks now comes down to three converging pressures: state government agencies are mid-way through a broader digital asset consolidation under the Victorian Government's Digital Strategy 2030 framework; the City of Melbourne is reviewing its media and communications infrastructure ahead of the 2026-27 budget cycle; and a handful of cultural institutions along St Kilda Road — including Arts Centre Melbourne and the National Gallery of Victoria — are negotiating new digital asset management (DAM) software contracts after their legacy systems reach end-of-life this financial year.

How the Mess Was Made

The roots trace back to roughly 2019-2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced organisations to digitise at speed, teams across Melbourne's Southbank cultural precinct and the CBD's government offices uploaded images to whatever cloud storage was available — often Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive and Dropbox simultaneously. Naming conventions collapsed. The same event photograph might exist as "NGV_opening_final.jpg", "opening night USE THIS.jpg" and an untitled thumbnail, across three separate drives, held by two different staff members who have since left.

By 2022, the problem had a name internally at several organisations but not a budget line to fix it. IT teams at Docklands-based organisations reported spending hours each week manually checking whether a requested image was already held in-house before approving a stock purchase. Adobe Stock's standard royalty-free image licences, which can run from roughly $AU29 to $AU199 per image depending on resolution and usage rights, were being bought repeatedly for images already sitting in unlabelled folders.

The City of Yarra, which covers the inner suburbs of Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond, conducted an internal audit of its communications assets in late 2024. The audit — details of which were discussed at a public council meeting and reported in council minutes — found that a substantial share of its stored images were either exact duplicates or near-identical variants of the same photograph taken in the same session. Yarra's experience became a reference point for other councils beginning similar reviews.

What Institutions Are Now Doing About It

The Victorian Public Record Office updated its digital records guidance in early 2026 to explicitly address duplicate asset management for the first time, recommending that agencies adopt automated deduplication tools as part of scheduled records reviews. Several Melbourne-based institutions are trialling software from vendors including Bynder and Canto, both of which have Australian sales operations, with pilot programs running inside agencies on Spring Street.

Arts Centre Melbourne, which manages one of the country's largest performing arts image libraries — spanning production photographs, portrait collections and archival material going back to the venue's 1984 opening — is understood to be among those evaluating new DAM platforms, though a contract decision has not been publicly announced. The NGV's digital collections team has separately flagged the issue in publicly available annual report disclosures, noting the complexity of managing high-resolution image files across multiple collection databases.

For smaller organisations without dedicated digital archivists, the practical path forward is less clear. Community arts groups in Brunswick and Northcote, many of which rely on Creative Victoria grant funding that does not typically cover infrastructure costs, have limited options beyond manually cleaning up their own drives. Several have turned to shared resources through the Arts Hub network.

The state government's Digital Strategy 2030 includes a whole-of-government asset register as a deliverable, though no public timeline for that specific component has been confirmed. What is confirmed: the organisations that have already invested in deduplication and DAM systems are reporting faster content workflows and fewer repeat licensing costs — a straightforward return on investment that is starting to shift the conversation from a technical nuisance into a genuine budget and governance issue across Melbourne's public sector.