Melbourne Leads Australian Cities on Duplicate Image Removal, But Global Rivals Are Moving Faster

Melbourne's public institutions removed more than 4,200 duplicate or mis-attributed images from their digital collections in the 12 months to June 2026, according to figures compiled across five Victorian cultural bodies — but comparable programs in Amsterdam and Seoul have processed volumes three to four times larger over the same period, raising pointed questions about the pace of reform here.

The issue matters now because a wave of AI-assisted cataloguing tools rolled out between 2024 and 2025 exposed just how large the duplicate image problem had become inside archives, council asset registers, and arts organisations. When institutions hold multiple copies of the same photograph or artwork scan — sometimes with conflicting attribution, sometimes attached to different licensing rights — those errors propagate across downstream databases, school resources, and government procurement portals. The problem is not cosmetic. It has real costs.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The most advanced local program sits inside the State Library Victoria on Swanston Street. The library began a systematic deduplication audit of its Pictures Collection in February 2025, targeting roughly 1.8 million digitised assets. Staff are using a combination of perceptual hashing software and manual curatorial review, with a dedicated team of six archivists assigned to the project full-time. The library has publicly committed to completing the first phase — covering pre-Federation photographs — by December 2026.

The City of Melbourne is running a parallel but smaller effort through its Creative Victoria grant portfolio, which funds digital infrastructure upgrades for independent arts organisations. A number of studios and galleries in Fitzroy and Collingwood received funding in the 2025–26 round specifically to audit and rationalise image libraries that had ballooned during the COVID-era rush to put collections online. The Collingwood Arts Precinct on Johnston Street was among the recipients, according to publicly available grant records.

These are meaningful steps. They are not, however, happening at the speed city administrators in comparable markets have managed.

How Melbourne Stacks Up Against Amsterdam and Seoul

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum completed a full deduplication pass of its 900,000-image online collection by March 2026 after a two-year program that began with a €2.1 million infrastructure investment in 2024. The museum's open-data team published a technical methodology report in April 2026 that has since been downloaded by institutions in at least 14 countries. Seoul's National Museum of Korea finished a comparable review of its 340,000-asset digital archive in October 2025, cutting confirmed duplicates by 18 per cent and correcting attribution errors on roughly 26,000 records.

Melbourne's State Library has not published a comparable benchmark or a timeline for the full collection beyond the initial phase. That gap — between strong intent and transparent public accountability — is where critics say the city is losing ground to international peers.

Singapore's National Heritage Board offers another instructive contrast. It deployed a centralised deduplication registry in 2023 that all eight of its member institutions feed into, meaning no single gallery or archive solves the same problem in isolation. Melbourne has no equivalent cross-institutional registry, meaning the State Library, the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road, and smaller bodies like the Immigration Museum on Flinders Street are each running separate processes with no shared data layer.

The NGV — whose digital collection spans more than 75,000 works — has not publicly detailed any active deduplication program as of this month, though its broader digital strategy document, published in 2024, flagged collection data integrity as a medium-term priority.

For smaller organisations navigating this without dedicated funding, the practical path forward is narrower. Arts bodies and councils in Melbourne looking to start the process can apply to the Australian Research Data Commons, which administers infrastructure grants for exactly this kind of digital remediation work. The next funding round closes on 15 September 2026. The ARDC's Collection Digitisation Infrastructure stream has supported projects in Brisbane and Perth over the past two years; Melbourne applicants have been underrepresented in recent cohorts.

The State Library's December deadline will be the first real test of whether Melbourne can close the gap on its own. The institutions that have done this well globally did not wait for a perfect system — they published their methodology, measured their mistakes openly, and built from there.