Melbourne's War on Duplicate Images: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Amsterdam and Singapore

Melbourne's major cultural institutions and local councils are accelerating efforts to audit and remove duplicate digital images from public repositories, a quiet but consequential shift in how the city manages its sprawling visual archives. The push comes as libraries, galleries and government agencies reckon with the cost of storing and serving redundant files — a problem that has ballooned alongside the digitisation drives of the past decade.

The timing matters. Across the developed world, cities that invested heavily in digitising physical collections between 2015 and 2022 are now confronting the downstream mess: servers packed with near-identical images, inconsistent metadata and user-facing search results cluttered by duplicates. For Melbourne, where the State Library of Victoria on Swanston Street holds more than two million digitised items and the City of Melbourne's own open-data portals carry thousands of street-level and event photographs, the problem is concrete and growing.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The State Library of Victoria has been piloting a perceptual-hashing deduplication tool across select photographic collections since early 2025, according to public documentation on its digital strategy. Perceptual hashing identifies visually similar images even when file names or metadata differ — a step beyond simple checksum matching, which only catches exact byte-for-byte copies. The library has not published outcomes from that pilot publicly as of July 2026.

Separately, Creative Victoria, the state government's arts funding body based in the CBD, updated its image submission guidelines for grant applicants in March 2026, requiring unique file identifiers to reduce duplication in its internal assessment system. That change followed an internal review the agency completed in late 2025, details of which have not been publicly released.

At the council level, the City of Yarra — covering suburbs including Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond — adopted a digital asset management policy in November 2024 that explicitly addresses duplicate imagery, requiring quarterly audits of its communications library. Officers there have described the policy in public council meeting minutes as a response to storage costs that had grown year-on-year since 2020.

Compare that to Amsterdam, where the Rijksmuseum completed a full deduplication pass across its online collection in 2023, removing roughly 14,000 redundant image records and consolidating metadata into a single canonical file per object. The museum published its methodology openly, giving smaller institutions a replicable framework. Singapore's National Heritage Board went further, integrating AI-assisted deduplication into its ingest pipeline by mid-2024, meaning new uploads are checked for duplicates before they ever enter the live archive.

Where Melbourne Lags — and Where It Leads

London sits somewhere in between. The British Library's digital team acknowledged in a 2025 annual report that deduplication remains incomplete across its sound and image holdings, citing the complexity of distinguishing intentional near-duplicate records — such as multiple prints of the same photograph — from unintentional redundancy. That nuance is exactly where Melbourne institutions have struggled too.

What Melbourne has going for it is a relatively tight network of institutions willing to share infrastructure. The Australasian Preservation Alliance, which counts the State Library of Victoria, Museums Victoria and several university libraries as members, has been workshopping a shared deduplication standard since February 2026. If adopted, the standard would apply consistent hashing and metadata rules across member repositories — something Amsterdam achieved institution by institution over five years, and that Singapore built into government procurement specifications from the outset.

The practical stakes for ordinary users are real. A researcher at the University of Melbourne searching the Trove aggregator for images of Flinders Lane in the 1970s currently retrieves duplicate and near-duplicate results regularly, wasting time and obscuring genuine variation in the archive. Fixing that is not glamorous work, but it is the kind of infrastructure investment that determines how usable public knowledge actually is.

The Australasian Preservation Alliance is expected to circulate a draft shared standard to member institutions by September 2026. Whether Melbourne's cultural sector can move from pilots and policy updates to a coordinated, city-wide deduplication framework before the next wave of digitisation projects begins will depend largely on whether that standard gets adopted — and funded — quickly enough.