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

Melbourne's cultural institutions are sitting on a digital storage problem that archivists have been flagging for years: tens of thousands of duplicate images cluttering collection databases, complicating public access and draining resources that smaller organisations can barely spare. The question now is whether the city is ready to tackle it with the same urgency that Amsterdam, London and Toronto have brought to bear.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 as the Victorian Government presses ahead with a broader digital infrastructure review across its funded arts and heritage bodies. The State Library Victoria on La Trobe Street and Museums Victoria, which manages collections at Melbourne Museum in Carlton and the Immigration Museum on Flinders Street, both maintain digital repositories running into the millions of image files. Duplicate entries — the same photograph or artwork scanned multiple times across different digitisation projects, or ingested from legacy systems with inconsistent metadata — compound storage costs and make online collection searches unreliable for researchers and the public alike.

What Other Cities Have Done

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum moved earliest and most decisively. The museum's IT team began deploying perceptual hashing algorithms across its Rijksstudio collection in 2019, a process that by 2023 had identified and resolved more than 80,000 duplicate or near-duplicate image records according to the museum's own published technical documentation. The result was a measurably cleaner public interface and a reduction in cloud storage overhead that the museum's annual reports attributed partly to the deduplication program.

London's Victoria and Albert Museum partnered with the Alan Turing Institute in 2022 on an AI-assisted cataloguing project targeting similar problems in its 1.2 million-object digital collection. Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario ran a staff-led audit beginning in late 2021, manually flagging duplicates across its Thomson Collection digital records before automating the final reconciliation stage.

Melbourne has moved more slowly. Museums Victoria acknowledged in its 2024–25 annual report that digital collection management was a priority area, though the organisation did not publish specific figures on duplicate record counts or resolution timelines in that document. The State Library Victoria has separately been expanding its digitised newspaper and photograph holdings through its ongoing Trove contribution, a partnership with the National Library of Australia that by mid-2025 had added more than 2.3 million Victorian newspaper pages to the platform — a scale that brings its own deduplication demands.

Local Pressures and Practical Gaps

The challenge for Melbourne institutions differs from their European counterparts in one key way: funding structure. The Rijksmuseum and the V&A operate with larger per-object technology budgets and access to substantial EU and UK research grant pipelines. Victorian cultural organisations largely depend on state allocations and competitive federal grants through the Australia Council for the Arts, which fund programming more readily than back-end infrastructure.

Smaller operators feel this most acutely. The Jewish Museum of Australia in St Kilda and the Chinese Museum on Cohen Place in the CBD both maintain growing digital archives connected to Melbourne's diverse migrant community collections. Neither has the internal IT capacity to run the kind of automated deduplication pipelines that larger institutions use. Sector workers in Victoria have argued, through bodies like Museums & Galleries of Victoria, that shared infrastructure — a centralised deduplication service available to small and mid-sized institutions — would be more cost-effective than expecting each organisation to build its own solution.

The Victorian Government has not announced a dedicated funding line for this kind of shared tooling, though Creative Victoria's current strategic framework, which runs to 2027, includes digital capability as a cross-sector priority. Whether that translates into cataloguing infrastructure or stays at the level of skills training depends on budget decisions expected in the 2026–27 state budget cycle.

For institutions and researchers in Melbourne navigating this now, the practical reality is a patchwork. Some collections are clean and searchable; others return duplicate results or miss records entirely because of metadata mismatches. The cities that have solved this problem — or come closest — did so by treating deduplication as infrastructure rather than housekeeping. Melbourne's cultural sector is still working out which category it belongs in.