Melbourne's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Amsterdam, Seoul and Toronto

Melbourne's public sector is sitting on a digital archive problem that administrators at the City of Melbourne and the Public Record Office Victoria have been quietly working through since at least early 2025: hundreds of thousands of duplicate images clogging planning databases, cultural collections and infrastructure records across the inner city and beyond. The issue surfaced publicly this year as the state government's broader digital transformation agenda pushed agencies to audit what they actually hold before migrating to consolidated cloud storage.

The timing matters. Victoria's Department of Government Services set a mid-2026 deadline for major agencies to complete initial data audits under the state's Digital Strategy refresh. Duplicate imagery — redundant photos of sites like the Flinders Street Station forecourt redevelopment, building inspection records in Fitzroy and Collingwood, and heritage documentation from the Carlton housing estates — is consuming storage budgets and slowing down search and retrieval for planners and archivists who rely on those records daily.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The City of Melbourne's Smart City Office has been piloting automated deduplication tools across its spatial data holdings since late 2024, targeting records tied to the CBD and the Hoddle Grid. The program, which draws on software used in conjunction with the Victorian Shared Services Centre, is designed to flag visually identical or near-identical images before human archivists make final deletion decisions. Public Record Office Victoria, based in North Melbourne on Macaulay Road, is running a parallel but separate process for its state heritage image collections.

Neither program is operating at the scale or speed of comparable efforts overseas. Amsterdam's municipal archive, the Stadsarchief, completed a full deduplication sweep of its 1.2 million digitised image records in 2023, using open-source perceptual hashing tools developed in partnership with Delft University of Technology. Seoul's Smart City Data Hub, which manages imagery from more than 9,000 urban sensor points, embedded automated duplicate-removal as a default processing step in 2022. Toronto's City Clerk's Office flagged in a 2024 annual report that it had reduced redundant digital assets in its planning image libraries by 34 per cent over two years through a structured review program.

Melbourne has not publicly reported comparable reduction figures. The City of Melbourne declined to provide current statistics on the scale of its duplicate holdings before publication deadline.

The Cost and the Catch-Up Challenge

Storage is not cheap. Commercial cloud archiving for large image files runs to roughly $30 to $50 per terabyte per month for government-grade services in Australia, according to published pricing from major providers active in the Victorian market. Multiply that across a council holding tens of millions of planning, events and infrastructure images and the redundancy costs become material. Independent estimates in the local government technology sector suggest Australian councils collectively spend millions of dollars annually storing data that a basic deduplication pass would eliminate — though no consolidated national audit has been published.

The deeper problem is governance, not technology. Melbourne, like Sydney and Brisbane before it, has accumulated images across departments that never shared metadata standards. A photo of a heritage wall in Carlton Gardens might exist in the parks department's Esri geodatabase, the heritage unit's separate content management system and a project manager's SharePoint folder simultaneously — filed under three different naming conventions with no automatic link between them.

Auckland City Council confronted the same fragmentation in 2021 and resolved it by mandating a single spatial data layer for all public imagery captured on Council business. That decision took 18 months to implement and required retraining roughly 400 staff across planning and infrastructure teams, according to a 2022 case study published by Local Government New Zealand.

For Melbourne residents and small businesses dealing with planning applications or heritage enquiries along streets like Sydney Road in Brunswick or Smith Street in Collingwood, the practical effect of unresolved duplication is slower responses and occasionally contradictory records. The City of Melbourne's current pilot is expected to produce an internal report by the end of the 2026 calendar year. Whether that report leads to a funded, council-wide program or sits in a queue with other digital transformation priorities will depend largely on the next budget cycle, with deliberations expected to begin in earnest in late 2026.