Melbourne Officials Battle Growing Costs of Duplicate Digital Image Cleanup

Melbourne's digital asset managers have a problem hiding in plain sight. Thousands of duplicate images are clogging government databases, council planning portals and cultural institutions across the city, inflating storage costs, slowing workflows and — in at least one documented case — causing the wrong demolition photo to be attached to a heritage permit application in the inner north. City of Yarra officials confirmed the incident to The Daily Melbourne this week, describing it as a symptom of a broader data hygiene crisis.

The timing is not accidental. Victoria's Department of Government Services finalised its Digital Asset Management Policy Framework in March 2026, setting a July 31 deadline for all state agencies to audit and de-duplicate their image libraries. That deadline is four weeks away, and sources at three separate agencies say they are nowhere near compliant.

The Scale of the Problem

The numbers are significant. A 2025 audit by the Victorian Auditor-General's Office found that the Department of Transport and Planning alone held an estimated 2.3 million image files across 14 separate internal drives, with duplication rates exceeding 40 percent in some project folders. Storage costs for the department ran to approximately $1.8 million annually, a figure the auditor flagged as "materially reducible" through systematic de-duplication. The audit report, tabled in Parliament on November 6, 2025, recommended a whole-of-government approach by mid-2026.

At the local government level, the problem is compounded by years of under-investment in records infrastructure. The City of Melbourne's digital archives team, based at the Melbourne Town Hall on Swanston Street, has been running a de-duplication pilot since February using software from a Fitzroy-based govtech firm, Civic Digital Solutions. The pilot covers planning permit imagery for the Hoddle Grid and Southbank precincts. Early results suggest roughly 35 percent of images in those folders are exact or near-exact duplicates.

Arts institutions are not immune. The State Library Victoria, whose picture collection on La Trobe Street holds more than 800,000 digitised items, launched its own image deduplication project in January 2026 after a Monash University study found that a subset of its publicly accessible Flickr Commons uploads contained significant duplication — in some cases the same photograph appearing under eight different catalogue entries. The library's director of digital access has described the remediation work as "foundational infrastructure," not glamorous, but essential before the institution can properly deploy AI-assisted search tools currently in procurement.

What Experts Are Urging

Information management specialists are pushing for standardised metadata practices rather than ad-hoc fixes. Dr Angela Marchetti, a digital records researcher at RMIT University's School of Information Systems on Swanston Street, has spent the past 18 months consulting with four Victorian councils on the issue. She argues the root cause is not technology but process: agencies capture images on multiple devices across multiple teams with no consistent file-naming convention, no centralised ingest point and no mandatory duplicate-check before archiving. Fixing that requires policy change, not just better software.

The CFMEU and construction sector have a stake in the problem too. Planning permit delays linked to incorrect or duplicated documentation — including site photographs — were cited in submissions to the State Government's Building Approvals Taskforce, which reported in May 2026. The taskforce recommended that all permit-supporting imagery be uploaded through a single verified portal by January 2027, a measure the Housing Industry Association backed publicly at a briefing in Richmond last month.

For agencies still scrambling before the July 31 state deadline, the practical advice from compliance officers is straightforward: prioritise high-risk folders first — planning permits, heritage assessments and infrastructure project files — before attempting a full-library sweep. Civic Digital Solutions is offering a free triage tool to Victorian councils through the Local Government Victoria procurement panel until the end of the financial year. After July 31, agencies that cannot demonstrate progress face the prospect of an adverse finding in the next Auditor-General review cycle, scheduled for late 2026. That is a reputational cost most department heads would rather avoid.