Melbourne's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Amsterdam and Toronto

Melbourne's public-facing digital infrastructure is carrying a growing weight of duplicate imagery — redundant photographs, repeated graphics and mirrored files spread across council databases, cultural institution websites and government communications portals. The City of Melbourne and several inner-suburban councils are now actively working through deduplication programs, benchmarking their progress against overseas cities that started the cleanup earlier and further along.

The timing matters. Victorian government agencies are under renewed pressure to streamline digital asset management following a broader push toward open-data standards and interoperability that accelerated after the state's 2024 Digital Strategy update. Duplicate image libraries inflate storage costs, slow content management systems and, in public-health and emergency contexts, can cause genuine confusion when outdated visuals circulate alongside current ones. For a city that positions itself as Australia's arts and cultural capital, the credibility of its digital face carries real weight.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne's Digital Services team, based at the Melbourne Town Hall on Swanston Street, has been running an internal audit of its asset management system since early 2026, according to materials published on the council's open procurement register. The audit covers imagery used across the council's website, the What's On Melbourne platform, and materials produced by Creative Victoria, the state arts funding body headquartered on Collins Street. A separate deduplication project is underway at the State Library Victoria on La Trobe Street, where digitised archival collections have accumulated significant file redundancy over two decades of scanning programs.

Inner-city councils are not far behind. Yarra City Council, which covers Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond, flagged duplicate digital asset management as a line item in its 2025–26 operational technology budget. The Merri-bek council — covering Brunswick and Coburg — has been piloting an automated tagging system through its community communications team since March 2026, using open-source deduplication tools rather than proprietary software, a choice driven partly by cost and partly by alignment with the council's open-source procurement policy.

The contrast with comparable global cities is instructive. Amsterdam's municipality completed a city-wide digital asset deduplication sweep in 2023, consolidating more than 40 institutional image libraries into a single searchable repository under the amsterdam.nl domain. The project reportedly reduced storage overhead by roughly 30 percent, according to documentation published by the Gemeente Amsterdam. Toronto's City Clerk's Office finished a similar rationalisation in late 2024, merging assets from 17 separate departmental systems. London's approach has been more fragmented — the 33 London boroughs operate independently, and deduplication efforts remain uneven, with the City of London Corporation and Tower Hamlets among the few to have published formal outcomes.

Why Melbourne Lags — and Where It Can Learn

Melbourne's challenge is partly structural. Unlike Amsterdam, where municipal digital governance is centralised, Victoria splits responsibility across the City of Melbourne, inner-suburban councils, state government agencies and semi-autonomous bodies like Arts Centre Melbourne on St Kilda Road and Melbourne Museum in Carlton. Each entity runs its own digital asset management system, and there is no single deduplication framework mandating shared standards.

The state's Department of Government Services has acknowledged the fragmentation issue in its published digital roadmap but has not set a hard deadline for cross-agency image library consolidation. That absence of a fixed date has frustrated some IT procurement staff within the local government sector, though no council has publicly named a timeline for full system integration.

The practical consequence for Melburnians is subtle but real. Search Melbourne City Council's website for images of, say, Federation Square or the Hoddle Street corridor and you will surface multiple versions of the same photograph tagged differently, dated inconsistently and sometimes attributed to different photographers — creating downstream headaches for media teams, journalists and accessibility compliance officers who rely on accurate metadata.

The next milestone to watch is the City of Melbourne's scheduled release of its Digital Asset Management Framework update, flagged for the third quarter of 2026. If that document includes binding deduplication standards that other Victorian councils can adopt, it would give Melbourne a coherent position — and something to actually benchmark against Amsterdam's 2023 model. Until then, the work is happening piecemeal, street by street through the council patchwork, rather than across the whole city at once.