Melbourne Councils and Cultural Institutions Move to Fix Duplicate Image Problem This Week

Melbourne's public institutions spent much of this week grappling with a mundane but costly problem: thousands of duplicate images clogging digital asset management systems, inflating storage bills, and slowing down the people who need to find the right photograph fast. The City of Melbourne and several inner-suburban councils are now formally reviewing their digital asset libraries after a broader Victorian government directive, issued in late June 2026, urged agencies to clean up redundant digital holdings before the end of the 2025–26 financial year.

The timing matters. Victoria's Department of Government Services has been consolidating cloud storage contracts across more than 40 public bodies, and duplicated image files — sometimes the same photograph stored dozens of times under different file names — have been identified as a significant cost driver. Digital asset hygiene has moved from an IT footnote to a genuine budget issue, particularly as agencies lock in storage pricing for the new financial year starting this month.

Who Is Doing What, and Where

The National Gallery of Victoria, on St Kilda Road, confirmed this week that it is mid-way through a project to de-duplicate its public-facing digital image catalogue, which covers tens of thousands of items from its permanent collection. The NGV's digital team is using automated hashing tools to identify identical or near-identical files before a manual review process flags anything that might be a legitimate variant — a different crop or resolution — rather than a true duplicate. The project, which began in April, is expected to wrap before the end of July.

At the Fitzroy-based Asialink Arts, staff have been working through a similar audit of promotional and archival photography dating back to the early 2010s. The organisation runs image-heavy grant applications and touring exhibition documentation, areas where duplicate files tend to accumulate across funding cycles. Asialink is one of several small-to-mid-sized arts organisations the Victorian government pointed to in its June directive as examples where duplication had grown unchecked during the rapid shift to remote working between 2020 and 2022.

Inner councils have also been active. Yarra City Council, which covers Collingwood, Richmond, and Abbotsford, began a stocktake of its planning and communications image libraries in the second week of June. A council spokesperson confirmed the review is ongoing but declined to give figures on duplication rates until the audit is complete. Moreland — now Merri-bek City Council — flagged a similar process in its July council meeting agenda, published on its website Tuesday.

The Numbers Behind the Problem

The scale of the problem is not trivial. Industry research published by the Australian Information Industry Association in its 2025 Digital Infrastructure Report found that unmanaged digital asset duplication costs Australian public sector organisations an estimated $340 million annually in excess storage, licensing, and administrative overhead. While that figure covers the full range of digital file types, images — particularly high-resolution photography and graphic design files — account for a disproportionate share of storage bloat in communications-heavy agencies.

Cloud storage costs have not fallen as steeply as many agencies anticipated. A standard 100-terabyte government cloud storage allocation from a major provider currently runs at roughly $2,800 to $4,500 per month depending on the contract tier and data retrieval frequency, according to publicly available pricing published by the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency. For councils carrying legacy archives with tens of millions of files, trimming duplicates can translate to measurable savings within a single contract year.

For organisations still assessing where to start, digital archivists recommend beginning with the highest-volume intake points: press image folders, grant documentation directories, and shared drives used during the pandemic era, when file-sharing habits were inconsistent and version control was minimal. Free and open-source tools including ExifTool and dupeGuru are widely used for initial scans, while larger institutions typically move to enterprise platforms once the volume of files exceeds what manual review can handle. The Victorian government's Digital Victoria program has published a guidance note for agencies navigating this process, available through its website. The deadline for compliance with the June directive is 31 July 2026.