Duplicate Images Are Costing Melbourne Institutions Thousands — Here's What Experts and Officials Are Saying

Melbourne's public institutions are sitting on a problem most would rather not advertise: sprawling digital asset libraries cluttered with duplicate images that drain storage budgets, slow down workflows, and, in several cases, have led to the wrong photograph being published or archived. The push to fix it — through a process known as duplicate image replacement — has moved from IT back-rooms to boardrooms, with officials, digital archivists and technology specialists now weighing in publicly on what it will take to clean things up.

The issue has sharpened this year as the Victorian Government's Digital Transformation Strategy, now in its second implementation phase, pushes state agencies to audit and rationalise their digital asset holdings by the end of the 2026 calendar year. For institutions already stretched by cost pressures, the audit deadline is concentrating minds.

The Scale of the Problem in Melbourne

The City of Melbourne's digital asset library, managed through its corporate records system at Town Hall on Swanston Street, is understood to hold well over a million image files accumulated across more than two decades of digital photography. Archivists working in similar municipal environments say duplication rates in unmanaged libraries commonly run between 20 and 40 percent — meaning hundreds of thousands of files may be redundant copies, variant crops, or near-identical shots from the same burst sequence.

The State Library Victoria, on La Trobe Street in the CBD, has undertaken its own internal review of digitised photographic collections as part of its Digitisation Program, which has been running since 2019. The library has publicly acknowledged the challenge of managing legacy duplication in historical collections where images were scanned multiple times across different projects, often at different resolutions, without a consistent naming or deduplication protocol.

RMIT University's Digital Media Lab, based at the Swanston Street campus, has been researching automated image deduplication tools since 2023, examining how perceptual hashing algorithms — software that identifies visually similar rather than byte-identical files — can be applied to large institutional collections. Researchers there have noted that simple file-matching tools miss up to 60 percent of true duplicates in photographic archives, according to findings presented at a 2025 Australasian Digital Libraries conference.

The financial stakes are real. Enterprise cloud storage for large image files — typically running at 24 megabytes per RAW file and above — is not cheap. Microsoft Azure and AWS both price high-capacity institutional storage tiers at rates that make a library of even 500,000 redundant files a measurable annual cost. Organisations that have completed deduplication projects in comparable Australian jurisdictions have reported storage cost reductions of between 15 and 30 percent, according to case studies published by the Australian Society of Archivists.

What Officials and Specialists Want Done

The Victorian Government's Chief Information Officer directorate issued updated digital asset management guidelines in March 2026, advising agencies to implement a three-step approach: audit existing holdings, apply deduplication tooling before any cloud migration, and establish a master image registry to prevent future duplication at the point of ingest. The guidelines stop short of mandating specific software platforms, but they reference open-source tools including digiKam and dHash libraries as viable starting points for smaller agencies.

Digital archivists at institutions like the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, on Russell Street in Federation Square, have been vocal at sector forums about the reputational risks beyond cost. Duplicate or near-duplicate images in a public-facing archive create confusion about provenance, licensing, and caption accuracy — problems that become acute when images are syndicated or used in legal proceedings. ACMI's collection management team has publicly discussed its adoption of a DAM (Digital Asset Management) platform overhaul, completed in late 2025, as a model for similar institutions.

Practically, the advice converging from archivists, IT officials and digital strategists is consistent: don't wait for a full system migration to begin deduplication, because migrating a bloated library compounds the problem. Institutions should run a perceptual hash audit on existing collections now, flag near-duplicates for human review rather than automated deletion, and build ingest rules that prevent duplicates entering the system at source. For Melbourne's cultural sector heading into the back half of 2026, those steps are quickly becoming not optional, but overdue.