Melbourne's duplicate image problem: how the city stacks up against Amsterdam, Toronto and Seoul

Melbourne's digital archives are riddled with them. Scan the City of Melbourne's open data portal or browse the Victorian Heritage Database and you will find the same photograph of Flinders Street Station appearing under three separate catalogue entries, or an identical aerial shot of the Hoddle Grid filed twice with conflicting metadata. The problem has a dry bureaucratic name — duplicate image replacement — but its consequences for researchers, urban planners and the institutions themselves are mounting.

The issue has sharpened this year because the Victorian government's housing density reform agenda depends heavily on accurate, non-duplicated visual records. Planning applications for the Fishermans Bend urban renewal precinct and the Arden–Macaulay corridor require clean image libraries to support heritage overlays and design guidelines. When the same photo appears under two different addresses, assessors can waste hours reconciling the mismatch — or worse, approve submissions based on the wrong building elevation.

What Melbourne is actually doing about it

The State Library of Victoria launched a deduplication project in March 2026, working through its Pictures Collection — approximately 750,000 digitised items — using open-source perceptual hashing software. Librarians on La Trobe Street say the first pass identified roughly 12,000 suspected duplicates, though full human review of those candidates is still months away. The City of Yarra separately contracted a digital asset management audit in early 2026 covering council records from Richmond and Fitzroy, after a planning officer flagged the same 2019 streetscape image appearing against four distinct properties in the Alphington heritage zone.

Creative Victoria, the state arts funding body, updated its grants portal in February 2026 to require applicants to submit images through a deduplication check before lodging — a small but practical fix that came after the 2025 round saw multiple organisations accidentally reuse press images from previous years, complicating acquittal reporting.

The Melbourne CBD Business Improvement District has been working with Destination Melbourne to audit visual assets used in tourism marketing. A joint review in May 2026 found that a set of 34 photographs taken along Swanston Street in 2021 had propagated across at least nine separate campaign microsites, sometimes with cropped or colour-adjusted variants catalogued as original images.

How that compares to what other cities are doing

Amsterdam has been at this longer. The City Archives — Stadsarchief Amsterdam — began a systematic deduplication program in 2022 covering its 800,000-image digital collection, deploying a combination of machine learning classifiers and volunteer reviewers. By mid-2025 the project had resolved more than 40,000 confirmed duplicates, according to the Stadsarchief's published progress reports. Toronto's City Clerk's Office embedded deduplication protocols directly into its procurement rules for contracted photographers in 2023, meaning new images enter the archive clean rather than requiring retrospective cleaning.

Seoul's approach is arguably the most centralised. The Seoul Metropolitan Government runs a single integrated digital asset management system across 25 autonomous districts, with deduplication checks running automatically on upload. That model is expensive — Seoul allocated the equivalent of roughly A$4.2 million to the platform build over three years according to the city's own published budget documents — and it reflects a governance structure quite different from Melbourne's fragmented council and agency landscape.

Melbourne's challenge is structural. Forty-two metropolitan councils, multiple state agencies and dozens of arts organisations each hold their own image libraries, with no common platform and no mandated deduplication standard. The Victorian government's Digital Victoria strategy, updated in late 2025, flagged interoperability as a priority but stopped short of requiring shared image infrastructure.

For practitioners working day-to-day — the heritage architect in Carlton pulling up a site photograph, the council planner in Dandenong checking a streetscape overlay — the practical advice right now is blunt: treat any image sourced from a government portal as potentially duplicated until cross-checked against the original acquisition record, and keep a local copy of the filename hash. Unglamorous, but until Melbourne builds something closer to Seoul's unified system, it is the most reliable safeguard available.