Melbourne's Digital Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — and the Numbers Tell a Damning Story

Victoria's public sector is quietly drowning in its own pixels. A pattern emerging across Melbourne's major cultural and civic institutions shows that duplicate image files — identical or near-identical digital photographs and scans stored multiple times across separate servers — now account for a significant share of total digital storage loads, pushing up infrastructure costs and degrading the searchability of public records.

The problem isn't new, but it has reached a critical mass. The shift toward large-scale digitisation programs — accelerated between 2020 and 2023 when physical archives were inaccessible during extended lockdowns — flooded institutional storage systems with files that were never properly deduplicated. The result is a sprawling, redundant mess that IT managers and archivists are only now beginning to quantify.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Industry benchmarks from enterprise data management research suggest that duplicate files commonly represent between 20 and 30 percent of total unstructured data held by large organisations. Apply that range to a major public institution running petabyte-scale storage — which several Melbourne organisations now do — and the wasted capacity runs into the hundreds of terabytes. At current commercial cloud storage pricing in Australia, sitting around $25 to $35 per terabyte per month depending on the provider and service tier, a mid-sized institution carrying 200 terabytes of redundant image data could be spending upward of $60,000 a year on storage that delivers zero additional value.

The State Library Victoria on Swanston Street, which holds one of the largest photographic collections in the Southern Hemisphere, completed a major digitisation push under its 2019–2024 strategic plan. The library has not publicly reported figures on duplicate image rates within its digital asset management system, but archivists working across the sector describe the problem as endemic to any institution that ran parallel digitisation workflows — scanning the same physical item through different departments or outsourced contractors without a unified ingest protocol.

The City of Melbourne's digital records infrastructure, managed partly through its Enterprising City programs, faces a parallel challenge. The council's photo libraries covering planning permits, heritage documentation and event photography have grown substantially since 2018, and without automated deduplication tooling integrated at the point of upload, the same image frequently enters the system multiple times under different file names. Across Flinders Lane and Swanston Street heritage precincts alone, planning staff have noted the sheer volume of near-identical facade photographs generated by permit applications over a five-year period.

Why Deduplication Has Stalled

Budget fragmentation is a core reason the problem persists. Digital asset management sits awkwardly between ICT budgets and library or archives budgets, meaning neither team fully owns the remediation task. Procurement of dedicated deduplication software — tools from vendors such as Veritas or Commvault, which can cost between $15,000 and $80,000 for an enterprise licence depending on storage volume — requires a business case that crosses departmental lines. That kind of cross-portfolio approval moves slowly in large public bureaucracies.

Creative Victoria, the state government agency that funds arts infrastructure including digital access programs, has flagged digital preservation standards as part of its broader cultural infrastructure work, though specific deduplication targets have not been publicly committed to in its current funding framework. The Public Record Office Victoria, based in North Melbourne, sets mandatory standards for how state records must be managed, but enforcement of those standards at the file-system level inside individual agencies remains inconsistent.

For institutions still mapping the scale of their problem, the first practical step is running a hash-based duplicate detection scan across their primary image repositories — a process that identifies identical files by generating a unique digital fingerprint for each one, regardless of filename. Tools to do this exist at low or no cost for smaller collections. The harder work is establishing governance rules so the same image doesn't enter the system four times next month. Without that upstream fix, any cleanup is temporary. Melbourne's archivists know this. The question is whether their budget holders do.