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

Melbourne's public cultural institutions are sitting on a quiet crisis. Across the State Library Victoria on Swanston Street, the City of Melbourne's online image repositories, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Federation Square, duplicate and misattributed images have accumulated over decades of digitisation — creating cataloguing headaches, copyright disputes, and eroded public trust in civic archives. The problem is not unique to Melbourne, but how the city responds to it is increasingly under scrutiny from archivists and digital preservation specialists across the Asia-Pacific.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 for a specific reason: a wave of AI-assisted cataloguing tools, rolled out by institutions in Amsterdam, Toronto, and Singapore over the past 18 months, has exposed just how extensive the duplicate image burden is in collections that were digitised quickly and cheaply during the 2000s and early 2010s. Melbourne's institutions digitised aggressively during that period, and not always with consistent metadata standards. That legacy is now catching up with them.

What Other Cities Are Doing

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam completed a major deduplication audit of its open-access digital collection in late 2024, a process that reportedly removed or consolidated tens of thousands of near-identical image entries — many created when records were migrated between database systems. The Toronto Public Library launched its Image Integrity Program in March 2025, allocating CAD $2.1 million over three years to cross-reference its visual holdings against the Digital Public Library of America's shared records. Singapore's National Heritage Board went further, mandating in January 2026 that all 47 institutions under its umbrella adopt a unified image fingerprinting protocol by the end of the financial year.

Melbourne has no equivalent mandated program. State Library Victoria confirmed in its 2024–25 annual report that it holds more than 1.6 million digitised images, but the library has not published a specific figure on what proportion have been assessed for duplication or misattribution. ACMI, which completed a significant collection redevelopment when it reopened in 2021 after a $40 million renovation, has invested in updated cataloguing systems but has not publicly detailed the scale of any duplicate image work. The City of Melbourne's own digital image archive — used by planners, journalists, and historians — runs on infrastructure that was last substantially upgraded in 2019.

The contrast with Singapore is particularly stark. Where Singapore's National Heritage Board issued a sector-wide directive, Melbourne's institutions each operate under different funding arrangements and different state and local government oversight. A specialist in digital preservation at an inner-city Collingwood records management firm described the fragmented governance model — where State Library Victoria answers to the Victorian Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions while ACMI operates under a separate trust — as making coordinated reform structurally difficult, though no formal review of that structure is currently on the public agenda.

The Local Stakes

The practical consequences are not abstract. Heritage overlays in suburbs like Carlton and Fitzroy depend heavily on photographic evidence lodged in civic databases. When duplicate or mislabelled images circulate in planning records — as occurred in at least one heritage objection process in the City of Yarra council area in 2023, according to documents tabled at a council meeting — it can complicate or delay decisions on building permits and heritage listings. The CFMEU's involvement in several major Fitzroy North and Brunswick construction projects in recent years has made accurate site documentation even more consequential for dispute resolution.

Archivists point to the State Library Victoria's Trove partnership with the National Library of Australia as one model that could be extended. Trove already flags duplicate newspaper digitisations across state library contributions; a similar deduplication layer applied to image records could, in theory, reduce redundancy across multiple Victorian institutions simultaneously.

For institutions looking to act before any government directive arrives, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), widely adopted in Europe and North America, offers an existing technical standard for cross-institutional image verification. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, Toronto Public Library, and the British Library all publish their collections in IIIF-compliant formats. State Library Victoria adopted IIIF compatibility for parts of its collection in 2022 — a foundation that specialists say could be built on without requiring new legislation or a fresh capital allocation, if the political will exists to make it a priority.