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

Melbourne's digital archives are full of themselves — literally. The City of Melbourne's open data portal, along with the State Library of Victoria's digitised collections on La Trobe Street, both contain substantial volumes of duplicate image files, a problem that archivists and records managers say has compounded steadily since the early 2010s migration to cloud-based storage systems.

The issue matters now because Victoria's government is mid-way through a $47 million digital transformation program that includes consolidating public-sector data assets. Duplicated images waste server space, inflate licensing costs, and make search results unreliable — a practical problem when planners in suburbs like Fishermans Bend or Arden are pulling heritage and planning documents under tight deadlines.

What Melbourne Is Actually Doing

The State Library of Victoria began a deduplication audit of its Trove-linked image collections in late 2024, working alongside the National Library of Australia in Canberra. The audit targets materials digitised under the library's Collaborative Digitisation Program. Separately, the City of Melbourne's data team has been piloting perceptual hashing tools — software that identifies visually similar images even when file names differ — across the council's Creative Victoria grant photography archive, which spans roughly 12 years of funded arts documentation.

Progress has been uneven. Unlike Amsterdam, where the Rijksmuseum's Rijksstudio platform completed a full deduplication pass of its 700,000-image open-access collection by 2023, Melbourne's institutions are working without a single shared standard. Toronto's City Archives implemented a cross-agency duplicate-detection framework under its Digital Service Standard in 2022, a move that reduced its image repository size by an estimated 18 percent, according to the Toronto Public Library's published digital strategy. Melbourne has no equivalent cross-agency mandate yet.

Seoul presents perhaps the sharpest contrast. The Seoul Metropolitan Government linked all ward-level image archives to a central Cultural Heritage Database in 2021, using AI-assisted classification developed through a partnership with KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The result was a publicly searchable, near-duplicate-free visual record — a goal Melbourne's institutions acknowledge they still cannot match.

Why the Gap Exists, and What's Changing

Part of the explanation is structural. Melbourne's public image collections are split across entities that don't share a reporting line: the State Library reports to the Victorian Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions; Creative Victoria sits under the Department of Premier and Cabinet; and the City of Melbourne's archives answer to the council. Co-ordinating them requires political will that, until recently, hasn't been present.

That's shifting, slowly. The Victorian Government's Data and Technology Strategy, updated in March 2025, includes a directive for agencies to adopt shared metadata standards by July 2027. The standard will cover image file formats and is expected to make automated deduplication tools interoperable across at least eight major state agencies for the first time. The Victorian Public Record Office in North Melbourne is leading the rollout.

For community organisations in areas like Footscray and Carlton, where local history groups maintain independent image archives of migrant communities, the council's current patchwork approach creates real friction. Cultural heritage groups have reported uploading photographs to multiple grant-reporting systems — sometimes the same image submitted three or four times under different program codes — because each agency's portal lacks the cross-checking that a unified backend would provide.

The practical advice for anyone dealing with this now: if you're submitting images to a Victorian government portal, use consistent file naming that includes date, location and a unique identifier. The Public Record Office's guidance document, last updated in February 2026, recommends the ISO 8601 date format paired with a project code. It won't fix the system, but it will make your own submissions easier to track — and easier to find when the deduplication tools eventually catch up.