How Melbourne's Councils Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — And What's Being Done About It

Melbourne's public sector has a clutter problem hiding in plain sight. Across council websites, State Government communications databases and cultural institution archives — from the City of Melbourne's online planning portal to Creative Victoria's grant-recipient image libraries — tens of thousands of duplicate digital images have accumulated over roughly a decade of uncoordinated content management. The effort to audit and replace them is now accelerating, driven by new procurement requirements and a 2025 Victorian Government digital-assets policy that took full effect on 1 January 2026.

The timing matters. Victoria's Department of Government Services flagged in its 2025 Digital Infrastructure Review that unmanaged asset duplication was inflating cloud storage costs and creating legal exposure around image licensing. Councils operating outdated content management systems — many still running on platforms procured before 2018 — had no automated deduplication layer, meaning the same photograph could exist in dozens of slightly different cropped or resized versions across a single website's backend.

How the Mess Built Up

The roots go back to the rapid digitisation push between 2015 and 2020, when agencies large and small migrated print archives online without consistent metadata standards. The City of Yarra, for instance, shifted its community services communications online during that period while simultaneously running parallel Instagram and Mailchimp campaigns that each required their own image uploads. Nobody was checking whether the photograph of the Collingwood Neighbourhood House being used in a June 2019 newsletter was the same file — or a renamed duplicate — already sitting in the corporate media library.

State bodies were no cleaner. Arts Centre Melbourne and the Melbourne Museum both operate image banks for media and public use, and both have acknowledged in internal planning documents — without specifying figures publicly — that legacy migration projects left residual duplication. The problem compounds when external contractors upload campaign assets: a promotional shoot conducted for Federation Square's summer program might generate 400 raw files, which then get culled, exported and re-uploaded at different stages by different vendors, each time without a deduplication check.

Open-source content management systems such as WordPress, widely used by smaller councils including Moonee Valley and Banyule, have no native duplicate-detection feature. Premium digital asset management platforms that do — tools like Bynder or Canto — carry licensing costs that can exceed $40,000 annually for a mid-sized local government, a price point that pushed many councils toward workarounds that ultimately made the problem worse.

The Push to Clean It Up

The Victorian Government's Digital Assets Policy, gazetted in late 2024 and binding on all departments from January this year, mandates that agencies maintain a single source of truth for public-facing media files and carry out annual audits. For local governments, the policy is advisory rather than compulsory, but the Municipal Association of Victoria has been actively encouraging adoption through its Digital Council program, which is coordinating bulk-licensing arrangements to reduce the cost barrier for smaller councils.

In practical terms, the cleanup involves three steps that agencies are working through at different speeds: first, running automated hash-comparison tools across existing image libraries to flag identical or near-identical files; second, establishing which version is the canonical, correctly licensed copy; and third, replacing embedded references across websites and documents before deleting the duplicates. For a council like Moreland — now operating as Merri-bek — which consolidated two legacy websites after amalgamation changes, that third step alone is estimated to involve thousands of individual page edits.

For residents and journalists trying to access council or government imagery, the practical impact of the cleanup should eventually be positive: faster-loading pages, cleaner search results within public libraries, and reduced risk of encountering an out-of-copyright image wrongly presented as a current photograph. Agencies that have completed Phase 1 audits are now in the replacement stage, with most Victorian department websites expected to complete the transition by the end of the 2026-27 financial year. Councils have been given until mid-2027 under the MAV's recommended timeline — though without a mandatory deadline, progress is likely to remain uneven across metropolitan and regional bodies.