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

Melbourne's public archives, council websites and arts databases are riddled with duplicate and misattributed images — a problem that cultural data specialists say has worsened sharply since institutions rushed to digitise collections during the pandemic years. The City of Melbourne has been quietly working through a backlog of duplicated visual records across its open-data portals, a process that gained formal momentum in late 2024 when the council adopted a revised Digital Asset Management Policy covering photography, maps and heritage imagery.

The issue matters now because Victoria's housing density reforms are generating an unprecedented volume of planning-related photography — site images, streetscape records, heritage assessments — being lodged with bodies including the Victorian Heritage Register and Development Victoria. Without robust deduplication systems, planners and heritage officers risk working from conflicting or outdated visual records, slowing approvals at a moment when the state government is under pressure to accelerate housing supply across inner suburbs like Brunswick, Footscray and Fitzroy.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne's data team has been running deduplication workflows through its open-data platform, data.melbourne.vic.gov.au, which hosts more than 300 publicly accessible datasets including photographic series covering Swanston Street, the Hoddle Grid and Docklands. The State Library of Victoria, on Swanston Street in the CBD, has separately been working since 2023 with its Pictures Collection — one of the largest photographic archives in the Southern Hemisphere — to flag and consolidate duplicate entries using a combination of perceptual hashing software and manual curatorial review. The library has not publicly disclosed how many duplicates have been identified or removed.

Arts institutions along Southbank, including Arts Centre Melbourne, have also been auditing their digital image libraries ahead of a broader push to list collections on the National Library's Trove aggregator. Trove, which draws from hundreds of contributing institutions across Australia, has historically struggled with duplicate records; the National Library flagged the problem in its 2023-24 annual report, noting deduplication as a continuing technical priority without specifying a resolution timeline.

How Melbourne Compares Globally

London is further along. The Victoria and Albert Museum completed a major deduplication project across its 1.2-million-image online collection in 2023, using open-source image-matching tools developed in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum — whose Rijksstudio platform is widely regarded as a benchmark for public cultural image access — built deduplication protocols into its collection management system from the outset of digitisation, giving it a structural advantage that older institutions are now trying to retrofit.

Toronto presents a more comparable case to Melbourne. The Toronto Public Library and City of Toronto Archives both operate digitisation programs that grew rapidly post-2020, and the city has acknowledged ongoing duplicate image issues in its open government progress reports. Toronto's approach has leaned heavily on vendor-supplied digital asset management platforms, whereas Melbourne has so far favoured a mix of in-house tooling and existing government IT contracts — an approach that costs less upfront but tends to produce slower, patchier results according to digital preservation practitioners in the sector.

The practical stakes are real. In heritage-sensitive suburbs like Carlton and South Melbourne, council planners rely on photographic records to assess whether a building's current state matches its registered heritage description. A duplicate or mislabelled image in a file can trigger additional site inspections, adding weeks to assessment timelines. With the Victorian government's housing targets placing pressure on councils to process applications faster, the image-quality problem is no longer just a librarian's concern.

What happens next depends partly on funding. The Victorian budget handed down in May 2026 did not include a dedicated line item for digital collections infrastructure visible in publicly available budget papers. Institutions seeking to upgrade their deduplication capabilities are largely competing for grants through Creative Victoria or making cases within existing capital budgets. For anyone lodging planning or heritage applications with Melbourne-area councils, the practical advice is straightforward: submit high-resolution, uniquely named image files with full metadata, and avoid resubmitting previously lodged photographs without clearly flagging them as duplicates — a small step that reduces the manual checking burden on already stretched assessment teams.