Melbourne's Councils Are Quietly Purging Duplicate Public Art Images — and Other Cities Are Watching

Melbourne's City of Melbourne council has been working through a systematic audit of duplicate images held across its public art registry and urban planning archives, a process that has exposed just how badly digital asset management fell apart during the pandemic-era digitisation rush of 2020 and 2021. The audit, which began in earnest in the second half of 2025, covers thousands of photographs spanning street art precincts in Fitzroy and Hosier Lane in the CBD, as well as heritage building records stretching back to the 1980s.

The timing matters. Victoria's housing density reforms have pushed planning departments to move faster on digital approvals, which means cluttered, poorly tagged image databases are no longer just an archival headache — they actively slow down development assessment workflows. A single site on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, can have dozens of near-identical condition photographs attached to a heritage overlay file, each uploaded separately by different contractors over several years, with inconsistent metadata.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The practical work is being handled through a combination of in-house council staff and a contract with the University of Melbourne's School of Computing and Information Systems, which has been piloting machine-learning deduplication tools on public datasets since early 2025. The program uses perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually near-identical images even when file names and upload dates differ — to flag candidates for removal or consolidation. The Victorian Department of Transport and Planning has separately flagged interest in applying similar tools to its Permit Activity Management System, known as PAMS, though no formal contract has been announced.

Creative Victoria, which manages image records for publicly funded art installations across the state, began a parallel review of its own digital archive in March 2026. The archive covers commissioned works from regional Victoria through to inner-city installations, and staff identified that some works — particularly those documented during the 2017–2019 Creative Spaces grant round — had accumulated upwards of forty duplicate image files per project.

How Melbourne Compares Globally

Amsterdam's Stadsdelen — the city's district administrations — completed a similar deduplication exercise across their heritage database in late 2024, reducing a 1.4-million-image archive by roughly 18 per cent, according to a published case study from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences released in February 2025. Toronto's City Planning division, by contrast, is still running largely manual review processes and has publicly acknowledged a backlog of unresolved duplicate records stretching to 2018.

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority is the benchmark most frequently cited by Australian planning technologists. The URA completed a full deduplication and re-tagging of its Development Control image library by mid-2024, integrating the cleaned archive directly into its GoBusiness licensing portal. The result was a measurable reduction in administrative back-and-forth on development applications, though the URA has not published a specific figure for time saved per application.

Melbourne's approach sits somewhere between Amsterdam's completed model and Toronto's still-manual one. The University of Melbourne pilot produced preliminary results showing that roughly 22 per cent of images in the council's Fitzroy and CBD public art holdings were flagged as probable or confirmed duplicates in an initial sample run conducted in November 2025. That figure has not been independently verified across the full archive.

For residents and small developers navigating the planning system, the practical upshot is a gradual improvement in the reliability of image evidence attached to heritage assessments. Planning lawyers operating around the Magistrates' Court precinct on William Street have noted informally that image-evidence disputes in heritage objections have become more common as archives grew messier — a problem that cleaner records should, in theory, reduce.

The council's full audit is expected to wrap up by December 2026, after which a decision on permanent software procurement will go to the Future Melbourne Committee. Neighbouring City of Yarra and City of Port Phillip councils have both been briefed on the program's progress, and both are understood to be assessing whether to run comparable reviews of their own planning image holdings ahead of the next state budget cycle.