Melbourne's duplicate image problem: how the city stacks up against global peers

Melbourne City Council's digital asset library holds tens of thousands of images accumulated over more than two decades of digital record-keeping — and a significant portion of them are duplicates. The council's ongoing audit, which began in earnest in early 2026 as part of a broader digital transformation program, has exposed a problem that archivists and records managers say is endemic to large municipal governments worldwide.

The timing matters. Cities are under growing pressure to digitise heritage collections, open data portals, and public art registers — all of which draw from centralised image repositories. When those repositories are cluttered with duplicate or near-duplicate files, search tools degrade, storage costs mount, and the public-facing portals that residents actually use become unreliable. For Melbourne, a city that has staked a significant part of its civic identity on its arts and cultural infrastructure, the stakes are higher than they might appear.

What Melbourne is actually doing

The City of Melbourne's Digital Services team has been working since February 2026 with the State Library of Victoria on Swanston Street to cross-reference duplicate holdings in the library's Pictures Collection against council-held assets. The project uses perceptual hashing software — technology that identifies visually similar images even when file names, resolutions or metadata differ — to flag candidates for removal or consolidation.

Separately, Creative Victoria, the state government's arts funding and development agency, launched a review of its own image archive in March 2026 after a routine audit found that its grants portal had been serving the same promotional photographs under multiple file identifiers, in some cases going back to 2018. The agency's archive spans more than 80,000 files covering funded projects from regional Victoria through to inner-city venues including the Arts Centre Melbourne on St Kilda Road.

The problem is not unique to government. The Fitzroy-based Australian Centre for the Moving Image — ACMI — spent much of 2024 and 2025 rebuilding its collection management system and encountered similar duplication issues when migrating legacy data. Staff there have described the migration as a multi-year process, though the institution has not publicly quantified the proportion of duplicate records involved.

How Melbourne compares globally

Amsterdam set a widely cited benchmark in 2023 when the City Archives — the Stadsarchief Amsterdam — completed a three-year deduplication project across 1.2 million digitised photographs, ultimately removing or merging roughly 140,000 records. The project cost approximately €2.1 million and is now held up by European municipal archivists as a model for phased deduplication rather than a single bulk-deletion exercise.

Singapore's National Heritage Board took a different approach, building a mandatory deduplication check into its upload workflow from 2022 onward, meaning new duplicates are theoretically blocked at the point of entry. The result is a cleaner forward-looking archive, but it did not resolve the backlog of legacy duplicates already in the system, which the board was still working through as of late 2025.

Toronto, which operates one of the largest English-language municipal open data portals in the world, ran a public consultation in 2024 asking residents to help flag duplicate or misidentified images in its historical photo collection — a crowdsourcing model that Melbourne's council has examined but not yet adopted.

By those measures, Melbourne is moving, but not quickly. The council's deduplication audit has no publicly announced completion date, and no budget figure has been released for the digital transformation program of which it forms a part. Advocacy group Digital Rights Watch, which tracks public sector data practices from its Melbourne office, has previously called for greater transparency in how councils manage and retire digital records, though it has not issued a specific statement on the current audit.

For residents and organisations that rely on the council's open image portals — urban planners pulling streetscape photos, historians accessing the City of Melbourne's heritage register imagery, journalists downloading licensed photographs for publication — the practical advice is the same as it has been for months: check file metadata carefully, verify that the image you are downloading is the version the council considers current, and report obvious duplicates through the council's digital feedback form. It is a workaround, not a solution. The audit, whenever it concludes, is the solution — and Melbourne is watching Amsterdam's playbook closely to get there.