By the Numbers: Melbourne's Duplicate Image Problem Is Costing Councils and Creatives More Than They Think

Thousands of duplicate images are sitting inside Victorian government databases, council content management systems, and publicly funded arts archives — and the bill for storing, managing, and manually reviewing them is climbing. An internal review process now underway across several Melbourne-area institutions is putting hard numbers to a problem that digital archivists have long flagged as serious but underfunded.

The timing matters. The Allan government's ongoing push to digitise public records — accelerating since the Public Records Office Victoria updated its Digital Preservation Policy framework in 2024 — has pushed more material online faster than institutions can quality-check it. The result is bloated repositories full of near-identical image files, duplicated across formats, upload dates, and departments, with no single system to catch them.

What the Data Actually Shows

Cloud storage is not free. Estimates from digital asset management vendors operating in the Australian government sector put the cost of redundant file storage in mid-sized municipal databases at between $18,000 and $45,000 per year per institution, depending on volume and platform. For an organisation like the City of Melbourne — which manages imagery across planning applications, event records, cultural collections, and infrastructure documentation — the compounding effect across dozens of internal drives and cloud buckets is significant.

The State Library of Victoria, whose Swanston Street headquarters holds one of the country's largest photographic collections, has acknowledged the challenge of deduplication in its digitisation pipeline. Its digitised collection publicly lists hundreds of thousands of items, a corpus that grew substantially during pandemic-era digitisation grants. Duplicate ingestion — where the same physical item is scanned twice under different catalogue entries — is a known failure mode in batch digitisation workflows. The Library has not published a specific duplicate rate, but comparable institutions internationally have reported duplication rates of between 8 and 22 percent in large photographic collections before deduplication tools are applied.

Creative Victoria, the state's arts funding agency based on Flinders Lane, funds dozens of digitisation projects annually through its Arts Projects grants stream. Without a mandatory deduplication audit requirement baked into grant reporting, funded organisations have little formal incentive to measure or eliminate duplicate image files before acquitting the grant. That gap is drawing attention from digital preservation advocates.

The Local Cost in Suburbs and Studios

The problem is not confined to Swanston Street institutions. Community arts organisations in Fitzroy and Collingwood — many of which received emergency digitisation funding during the 2020-2022 period — are sitting on file libraries that were assembled quickly and never reviewed for redundancy. A single oral history project can produce hundreds of associated portrait files, event photographs, and scanned documents, with duplicates created each time a file is resized or reformatted for different distribution channels.

At the municipal level, the City of Yarra has been running its digital asset consolidation program since early 2025, targeting exactly this kind of file sprawl across its parks, events, and heritage planning units. The program does not publish granular statistics publicly, but the broader pattern — rapid digitisation followed by retrospective cleanup — is consistent with what digital records managers across Victoria describe as the standard lifecycle.

Free and low-cost deduplication tools exist, including open-source options like dupeGuru and commercial platforms integrated into systems such as Komprise or Cloudian. The barrier is rarely technology. It is staff time and institutional priority. A mid-level archivist reviewing duplicate flags manually can process roughly 500 to 800 image records per day, meaning a database of 200,000 images with a 10 percent duplication rate represents a five-to-eight week full-time workload before a single file is deleted.

Organisations expecting to acquit digitisation grants or comply with updated Public Records Office Victoria standards in the second half of 2026 should build deduplication audits into their project timelines now, not after upload. The numbers suggest the cost of fixing the problem after the fact is reliably higher than preventing it at the point of ingest — and in publicly funded collections, that cost ultimately lands with Victorian taxpayers.