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

Melbourne's public institutions are sitting on millions of duplicate digital images, and the systems meant to catch them before they waste storage, distort archives and erode public trust are running years behind comparable cities. That's the picture emerging from a review of procurement records and digitisation project documentation across several Victorian government agencies this year.

The problem sounds mundane. It isn't. When a council planning portal holds six near-identical scans of the same heritage facade, or a public health agency uploads the same patient education graphic under five different file names, the downstream costs compound fast — in storage bills, in staff hours, in search results that bury the authoritative version under noise. Sydney's June temperature records may dominate the national conversation right now, but inside government IT divisions across Australia, a quieter data-hygiene crisis has been building since the pandemic-era digitisation surge of 2020 and 2021.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne's digital services team has been running a content audit program across its asset management databases since early 2025, targeting the property and permits image library held at its Swanston Street offices. The program uses perceptual hashing — a technique that flags visually similar images even when file names differ — to identify redundant files before they migrate into the council's new cloud infrastructure. A similar exercise is underway at the State Library Victoria on La Trobe Street, where the Digitisation Centre has been processing the backlog of photographic collections since its expanded facility opened in late 2023.

Neither program is fully resourced. The State Library's digitisation team, which handles everything from nineteenth-century glass plate negatives to contemporary born-digital donations, has publicly noted in its annual reports that deduplication sits downstream of core ingestion priorities. The library's 2024–25 annual report listed the photographic collections backlog at over 1.2 million items, a figure that makes systematic duplicate checking a significant operational challenge rather than a routine checkbox.

Creative Victoria, the state government's arts funding and policy agency based in the CBD, has also been working through a digital asset overhaul tied to its Creative State strategy. Its image library — used for grant documentation, marketing and program records — underwent a partial deduplication audit in the first quarter of 2026, according to procurement notices published on the Victorian Government tenders platform.

How London, Amsterdam and Toronto Compare

London's approach offers a useful benchmark. The Greater London Authority centralised its image asset management under a single Digital Services framework in 2022, mandating that all borough-level visual assets above 5MB pass through an automated deduplication check before entering shared storage. The City of Amsterdam went further in 2023, integrating its municipal archive deduplication protocols directly into its open-data publishing pipeline, meaning duplicate images are flagged before public release rather than after. Amsterdam's Stadsarchief — the city's official archive on Vijzelstraat — now reports a duplicate detection rate of roughly 18 percent on new ingestions, according to figures the archive published in its 2024 digital strategy document.

Toronto's situation is closer to Melbourne's. The City of Toronto completed a digital asset management review in late 2024 that found significant duplication across departmental silos, particularly in planning and parks imagery. Toronto allocated CAD $2.3 million in its 2025 capital budget to address the problem, a figure that drew criticism from some councillors who argued the root cause was poor file-naming governance rather than a technology gap.

Melbourne has no equivalent centralised budget line that is publicly visible, and the work is being absorbed into broader IT modernisation projects with varied timelines across agencies. The City of Melbourne's 2025–26 budget allocated $47 million to digital transformation broadly, but deduplication is not broken out as a separate program.

The practical stakes will sharpen over the next 12 months. The Victorian government's Suburban Rail Loop project is generating its own flood of construction imagery across sites from Cheltenham to Box Hill, all of it flowing into agency document management systems with inconsistent metadata standards. Agencies that do not establish clear deduplication protocols before that visual record grows larger will face a significantly more expensive clean-up later. IT governance teams at both the Department of Transport and Planning and Infrastructure Victoria would do well to look at Amsterdam's pipeline approach now, before the backlog becomes unmanageable.