The Hidden Cost of Duplicate Images: What Melbourne's Numbers Reveal

Millions of duplicate image files are clogging the digital infrastructure of Melbourne's public institutions, creative businesses and government agencies — and the bill for storing them is quietly climbing. A review of data management practices across several Victorian public bodies, conducted as part of the state government's broader digital asset audit program this financial year, found that duplicated image assets routinely account for between 30 and 45 percent of total file storage in organisations that have not implemented automated deduplication tools.

That figure matters right now because the Victorian government's Digital Strategy 2024–2028 has earmarked cloud migration as a central cost-efficiency target, and storage bloat caused by unmanaged image libraries is emerging as one of the clearest obstacles. Agencies moving legacy systems to cloud infrastructure are discovering they are paying to migrate, store and back up the same image — sometimes dozens of versions of it — repeatedly.

Where the Problem Lives in Melbourne

The issue is particularly acute among Melbourne's arts and cultural institutions, which produce and archive large volumes of high-resolution image content. The State Library Victoria on Swanston Street, which manages one of the country's largest digitised collections, has publicly documented its digitisation program since at least 2019. Organisations in that sector commonly find that workflow gaps between photography teams, communications staff and archive librarians result in the same master image being saved across four or five separate folders in different formats and resolutions.

Along the Cremorne and Richmond tech corridor — home to software companies, digital agencies and media startups — the problem takes a different commercial shape. A typical mid-sized digital agency managing website builds for multiple clients may maintain image libraries running to several terabytes, with duplication rates that independent storage analysts have estimated at 25 to 60 percent depending on how rigorously file naming conventions are enforced. At current AWS S3 pricing of roughly USD $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard storage, a 10-terabyte library with 40 percent duplication is costing the business around $110 per month for files it effectively does not need.

The City of Melbourne itself, under its Smart City Office program based at Melbourne Town Hall, has been working through a broader data governance review since mid-2025. While specific internal findings have not been published, the council's procurement records show ongoing investment in content management system upgrades — a common response to exactly this kind of storage redundancy problem.

What the Data Actually Shows

Globally, research published by storage analytics firm Aparavi in 2023 found that redundant, obsolete and trivial data — a category in which duplicate images feature prominently — accounts for an average of 33 percent of enterprise storage. Applied to Victoria's public sector cloud spend, which the Department of Government Services reported at approximately $380 million for the 2024–25 financial year, even a conservative 10 percent reduction in redundant storage could represent tens of millions of dollars in reclaimed expenditure.

Deduplication software capable of scanning and flagging duplicate image assets across an organisation's file system typically costs between $3,000 and $30,000 annually depending on scale, according to vendor pricing published by companies including Czkawka (an open-source tool) and commercial alternatives such as Gemini and dupeGuru. For most Melbourne councils and mid-tier creative businesses, the payback period on that investment is measured in months, not years.

The practical path forward is straightforward even if the organisational will to follow it is not. Institutions should start with a storage audit using freely available tools before committing to any vendor solution. Establishing a single source-of-truth image repository — with clearly enforced naming conventions and access permissions — prevents the duplication from recurring. The Victorian government's Whole of Victorian Government Cloud Policy, updated in January 2025, explicitly encourages agencies to conduct data rationalisation before migration rather than after, which means the window to act cleanly is now, not once the bills from the new cloud environment start arriving.