Duplicate Image Replacement: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Digital asset managers across Melbourne's public sector are pushing for a unified policy on duplicate image replacement after an internal audit cycle revealed widespread redundancy in how councils, arts bodies and government agencies store visual content. The pressure has landed squarely on the desks of IT procurement officers and archivists who say the status quo is costing institutions money they cannot afford to waste.

The issue has sharpened focus in 2026 for practical reasons. The Victorian Government's Digital Strategy, extended through to 2027, explicitly requires agencies to reduce storage overhead and improve data integrity across public-facing platforms. Duplicate images — photographs stored multiple times under different file names, resolutions or metadata tags — sit at the centre of that problem. For large institutions running heritage collections or planning portals, the redundancy compounds across terabytes.

Where the Problem Is Being Felt

At the City of Melbourne's digital services unit, staff managing the open-data portal on Swanston Street have been working through a reclassification process that flags identical or near-identical image files before new content is uploaded. The exercise, begun in the first quarter of this year, was prompted partly by complaints from urban planning teams who found legacy photographs from the Docklands redevelopment period duplicated dozens of times across shared drives.

The State Library of Victoria on La Trobe Street faces a version of the same challenge on a much larger scale. Its digitisation program, which has been running in phases since 2019, has produced an image library now exceeding several million files. Archivists there have described the challenge of deduplication as an ongoing workflow problem rather than a one-time fix — new scans arrive weekly, and without automated detection tools, human review alone cannot keep pace.

Creative Victoria, which funds digital arts projects across the state, has also begun asking grant recipients to confirm image asset management practices as part of acquittal reporting. The requirement was added to the 2025–26 funding round conditions and reflects broader pressure on the arts sector to demonstrate responsible stewardship of public money.

What the Experts Are Arguing Over

The core disagreement among practitioners is not whether duplicates should be removed — almost everyone agrees they should — but at what point in the content lifecycle the replacement should happen. Some digital archivists argue that flagging duplicates at the point of ingest, before files enter a permanent collection, is far cheaper than retrospective cleaning. Others say retrospective audits are unavoidable because legacy systems were never built with deduplication in mind.

Technology vendors pitching to Victorian government bodies are promoting AI-assisted perceptual hashing tools, which can identify visually similar images even when file names and metadata differ. Pricing for enterprise-level platforms of this kind typically starts around $40,000 annually for mid-sized institutional deployments, according to publicly available tender documents from comparable interstate procurements. For smaller councils — particularly those in Melbourne's outer ring such as Cardinia Shire or Melton City — that figure represents a significant line item against already stretched IT budgets.

RMIT University's School of Information Technology, based on Swanston Street, has been involved in research examining automated image deduplication within cultural heritage settings. The school's involvement signals growing academic interest in what was previously treated as a purely administrative problem. Practitioners in the field argue it is now a governance issue, touching on records law, copyright, and the reliability of public information portals.

The Victorian Public Record Office has published guidance reminding agencies that replacing or deleting digital records — including image files — must comply with the Public Records Act 1973. That means a straightforward technical fix can carry legal weight if the duplicate happens to be a record of government activity.

For institutions working through this now, practitioners recommend a three-step approach: audit existing holdings using automated tools, establish a clear retention policy that distinguishes archival originals from working copies, and build deduplication checks into upload workflows going forward. The City of Yarra has reportedly begun a comparable exercise ahead of a planned refresh of its community grants image library later this year. Getting the policy settings right before the tools are deployed, most experts agree, is the part that actually takes time.