Melbourne Is Quietly Leading the World on Duplicate Image Replacement — But the Gap Is Closing Fast

Melbourne's digital archivists and council web teams are dealing with a problem that sounds mundane until you look at the numbers: tens of thousands of duplicate images clogging public databases, slowing government platforms, and quietly undermining the integrity of civic records. The City of Melbourne, which manages one of the largest municipal digital asset libraries in the southern hemisphere, began a structured duplicate-image replacement program in late 2024 — and by mid-2026, the effort has drawn interest from counterpart agencies in Amsterdam, Toronto, and Singapore.

The timing matters. Across Australia, state and local governments are under mounting pressure to cut operating costs in digital infrastructure. The Victorian Government's broader ICT reform agenda, which has included consolidating data centres and rationalising software licensing since 2023, has pushed councils and state agencies alike to audit what they actually hold in storage. Duplicate image files — photographs taken at civic events, planning documents, infrastructure records — turn out to be one of the most wasteful categories of redundant data.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The program operating out of the City of Melbourne's Digital Services branch on Little Collins Street uses a combination of perceptual hashing software and manual curation review to flag near-identical images across the council's content management system. The goal is not simple deletion — it is replacement: ensuring the highest-quality version of any given image becomes the canonical record, with metadata preserved and all internal links updated automatically.

The State Library of Victoria on Swanston Street runs a parallel effort through its Digitisation and Access team, focused on its historical photographic collection. That project, which began formally in February 2025, addresses a different problem: analogue-era duplications that occurred during multiple scanning rounds conducted between 2008 and 2019. Librarians there have estimated — in internal planning documents circulated to Victorian government stakeholders — that roughly 12 per cent of scanned items in certain photographic collections existed as functional duplicates before the audit began.

Amsterdam's Stadsarchief, which manages the city's municipal records, began a comparable audit in 2023 and has publicly reported reducing its image storage load by around 18 per cent over the first 18 months of operation. Singapore's National Archives ran a pilot in 2024 using AI-assisted deduplication tools, completing a review of approximately 400,000 digital assets in four months. Toronto, by contrast, has been slower — a city audit tabled in early 2026 found its digital asset management system still lacks an automated deduplication function.

The Global Benchmark Problem

Melbourne's approach sits somewhere between Amsterdam's archival rigour and Singapore's speed. The City of Melbourne's program does not yet cover all departments — the planning and building divisions manage their own image repositories under separate systems, meaning a photograph of a Fitzroy terrace, for instance, might exist independently in three different council databases simultaneously.

That fragmentation is the most persistent problem. A review by the Victorian Auditor-General's Office, published in March 2026 and examining digital asset management across several public sector bodies, noted the absence of a whole-of-government image taxonomy as a structural gap. The audit did not name the duplicate image problem specifically, but its finding that data governance frameworks remained inconsistent across agencies is on the public record.

The practical cost is real. Cloud storage pricing for government agencies in Australia typically runs between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month under enterprise agreements — figures that compound quickly when archives run into the hundreds of terabytes. Deduplication, done properly, can reduce active storage volume by 15 to 25 per cent in image-heavy collections, according to international benchmarks from the Digital Preservation Coalition, a UK-based body whose guidance is used by the State Library of Victoria.

For Melbourne to close the remaining gap with Amsterdam and pull clearly ahead of Toronto, the next step is convincing Victorian central government to mandate a shared image taxonomy — one set of rules, one canonical file standard, applied across all agencies. The City of Melbourne's Digital Services team is reportedly in discussions with the Department of Government Services about exactly that. Whether those talks produce a policy before the end of 2026 will determine whether this city's early lead holds.