Melbourne Leads Australian Cities in Tackling Duplicate Digital Images, But Lags Behind Amsterdam and Seoul

Melbourne City Council's digital asset team quietly flagged a problem last year that archivists in a dozen global cities have been wrestling with for nearly a decade: duplicate images clogging public-facing databases, inflating storage costs, and returning misleading results in heritage and planning searches. The council confirmed in its 2025–26 digital infrastructure review that duplicated image files accounted for a measurable share of its content management overhead, prompting a remediation program now entering its second phase.

The timing matters. Victoria's housing density reforms have pushed planning portals to their limits, with permit applications in inner-city suburbs like Fitzroy and Brunswick generating unprecedented volumes of site photography, heritage documentation, and architectural renders. When duplicates pile up inside those systems, planning officers can pull the wrong version of a heritage overlay image, or heritage consultants can cite superseded photography in submissions. The practical consequences are not trivial.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne is running its deduplication work through a partnership with the State Library of Victoria on St Kilda Road, which has operated a digital preservation program since 2019. The library's Digital Preservation Policy, last updated in March 2024, sets out checksum-based verification as the standard method for identifying exact and near-duplicate files across its holdings of roughly 4.2 million digitised items. Melbourne City Council has adopted a compatible framework for its own Planning and Building portal, with a target of completing the first full audit of pre-2020 image assets by December 2026.

Creative Victoria, the state government's arts funding and development agency, is separately managing duplicate imagery across the Arts Hub precinct in Southbank, where multiple tenants — including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square and the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road — have historically uploaded overlapping promotional photography to shared event calendars. A coordinated asset register, piloted across those two venues in the first quarter of 2026, is being assessed for broader rollout.

Amsterdam set its benchmark early. The city's Digitaal Erfgoed (Digital Heritage) program, operating under the Amsterdam City Archives since 2018, reduced duplicate image records in its public search portal by 34 per cent over three years, according to figures the archives published in its 2022 annual report. Seoul's National Folk Museum completed a similar audit in 2023 covering 1.1 million photographic records, eliminating redundant files through a machine-learning triage tool developed with Naver. Both cities invested in purpose-built deduplication infrastructure; Melbourne, by contrast, is adapting existing vendor platforms, which archivists here say is slower but cheaper upfront.

The Global Comparison

London's National Archives rolled out automated duplicate detection across its Discovery portal in late 2023, covering documentary and photographic records stretching back to the Domesday digitisation project. The tool flags near-duplicates — images that are not byte-identical but are visually near-identical, typically different scans of the same physical object — for human review rather than automatic deletion, a cautious approach that Melbourne's State Library has also adopted.

Singapore's National Heritage Board went further, publishing an open-source deduplication toolkit in February 2025 that smaller institutions globally have since adopted. No Melbourne institution has formally adopted that toolkit as of July 2026, though the Public Record Office Victoria in North Melbourne has listed it for evaluation in its current strategic plan.

Storage costs are a real driver. Commercial cloud storage for large image archives typically runs between $0.02 and $0.05 per gigabyte per month, depending on access tier and provider. For an organisation holding millions of high-resolution files, duplicates can represent tens of thousands of dollars in avoidable annual expenditure — before factoring in the staff time spent manually resolving version conflicts.

For Melburnians dealing with the council's planning portal or the State Library's image search, the practical upshot is that search results should become more accurate and faster to load as the audits progress. The council's December 2026 deadline for phase one is the clearest milestone to watch. If the Fitzroy and Brunswick planning records are cleaned up by then, the methodology will almost certainly be extended to older inner-north and inner-west suburbs, where pre-2015 permit photography is the most chaotic. Whether the budget holds for that extension is the question no one in the council's digital team is willing to answer on the record yet.