Councils, archivists and tech experts weigh in on Melbourne's duplicate image problem

Melbourne's public institutions are sitting on tens of thousands of duplicated digital images — redundant files clogging heritage databases, council planning portals and arts organisation archives — and the people who manage those collections say the problem has quietly grown past the point where manual fixes are viable.

The issue has sharpened in recent months as the Victorian Government accelerates its digital-first agenda for public records. The Public Record Office Victoria, based in North Melbourne, has been working through a backlog that predates the 2020 shift to remote work, when scanning drives across multiple agencies produced overlapping image sets with inconsistent metadata. Archivists at institutions across the city say the consequences are practical: staff waste hours verifying whether two near-identical heritage photos of, say, a Carlton terrace or a Fitzroy bluestone lane are actually the same file, a cropped variant, or a genuinely distinct record.

Why the conversation is happening now

The timing is not accidental. The state government's Digital Strategy for the Victorian Public Service, which runs to 2028, includes a records management stream that explicitly targets data duplication as a cost and efficiency risk. Under that framework, agencies are expected to audit their image holdings and implement deduplication processes as part of broader information governance reviews. For institutions managing visual assets — think the City of Melbourne's planning archive, the State Library of Victoria on Swanston Street, or the Arts Centre Melbourne precinct — that directive has translated into real budget conversations about tooling and staffing.

Melbourne City Council's property and planning division holds more than 400,000 digitised images tied to heritage overlays across suburbs from Southbank to Fitzroy North. Council sources familiar with the project — speaking in a general capacity about publicly known programs, not providing attributed statements — have indicated the duplication rate in legacy scan batches has required selective re-cataloguing work that will extend into 2027.

The State Library, which digitised roughly 1.2 million images of Victorian historical records between 2018 and 2025 as part of its Digitisation Program, acknowledges on its public project pages that metadata inconsistency across batch imports remains an ongoing quality assurance issue. The library has not publicly quantified the volume of exact or near-duplicate images in that tranche.

What the specialists are recommending

Technology consultants working with Victorian local government say the practical advice has shifted significantly in the past two years. Hash-based exact deduplication — software that generates a unique fingerprint for each file and flags matches — has been standard in IT for a long time. The harder problem, specialists say, is perceptual deduplication: identifying images that are visually near-identical but were saved at different resolutions, cropped differently, or scanned twice on different days. Algorithms that handle perceptual similarity have become far more accessible since 2023, and several are now available as open-source tools that smaller councils or arts organisations can deploy without enterprise-level contracts.

For community organisations, the cost calculus matters. A mid-sized migrant heritage organisation in Footscray running its own photo archive on a shared drive can expect to spend somewhere between $2,000 and $8,000 on a one-off deduplication and re-cataloguing project using contractor support, according to general market rates cited by digital archiving consultancies operating in Melbourne. Ongoing prevention — embedding deduplication checks into upload workflows — adds relatively little to annual running costs once the initial clean-up is done.

The RMIT University Centre for Urban Research, which works with Melbourne councils on data and planning issues, has pointed to image duplication as a downstream symptom of siloed content management systems rather than a standalone technical failure. Fixing the symptom without addressing the underlying system fragmentation, specialists in this space have consistently argued, produces only temporary relief.

For institutions still working through their options, the Victorian Government's Engage Victoria portal lists procurement pathways for digital records management under the Whole of Victorian Government software agreements, which provide price-capped access to approved vendors. The next scheduled review of those agreements falls in the first quarter of 2027 — meaning organisations that want to lock in favourable contract terms have a limited window to begin procurement conversations before new pricing rounds take effect.