Perth's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Singapore, Amsterdam and Austin

Perth City Council's digital assets team flagged more than 14,000 duplicate images across the City of Perth's public-facing digital platforms between January and May 2026, according to internal documents tabled at a council infrastructure committee meeting in June. The backlog — spanning tourism portals, planning application databases and the council's own Landgate-linked property records — has become a pressure point for a city whose population growth is outpacing its digital housekeeping.

The timing matters. Western Australia's housing construction pipeline is running at near-record volume, partly driven by AUKUS-related workforce migration into the northern suburbs and a sustained surge in skilled migration. Every development application filed through the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage generates multiple site photographs, floor plans and geospatial images, many uploaded more than once by different parties in the same approval chain. The result is a sprawling, redundant image library that slows system response times and creates compliance headaches for planners working out of offices in Optima Centre on Havelock Street in Osborne Park.

What Other Cities Are Doing

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority began a systematic deduplication program in 2023 under its GovTech partnership, deploying perceptual hashing algorithms across its development control databases. By late 2025, the URA reported a 34-percent reduction in stored image volume — a figure cited in a GovTech published review. Amsterdam's municipality, facing similar pressures from its Omgevingsloket online planning portal, contracted a Dutch civic-tech firm to run quarterly deduplication sweeps starting in April 2024. Austin, Texas, rolled out automated image validation as part of its 2025 digital permitting overhaul, cutting processing times on permit applications by an average of 11 days.

Perth has no equivalent program at that scale yet. The City of Perth and the broader Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage are understood to be reviewing vendor options, but no contract has been publicly announced as of July 2026. Landgate, the state's land information authority headquartered in Midland, runs its own imagery management system for aerial and cadastral data, but that system does not interface automatically with local council planning portals — a gap that practitioners at planning firms along St Georges Terrace in the CBD describe as a daily friction point, though none contacted by The Daily Perth agreed to speak on record.

A Local Lag With Real Costs

The practical cost is not trivial. Storage provisioning for state government digital infrastructure in Western Australia was budgeted at roughly $47 million in the 2025-26 state budget across the Department of Finance's whole-of-government ICT cluster. Redundant image data is a known contributor to storage blowout across comparable jurisdictions, though WA's Department of Finance has not published a specific figure attributing costs to duplicate imagery.

The Metronet project office, coordinating rail corridor documentation from its base in East Perth, manages thousands of engineering and survey images per corridor stage. The Byford Rail Extension alone generated documentation across more than a dozen contractor teams. Without a unified deduplication protocol, version-control problems have emerged — a fact acknowledged in general terms in the Public Transport Authority's 2025 annual report, which noted ongoing work to improve digital asset management standards.

Perth's position is not unusual for a city of roughly 2.2 million people growing at an annual rate that has repeatedly surprised state demographers. What distinguishes it from Singapore or Amsterdam is the absence of a funded, time-bound remediation program backed by a central digital authority. Both those cities started with a government mandate, a vendor contract and a deadline. Perth is still in the assessment phase.

For developers, architects and planners lodging applications through the state's eDevelopment portal, the practical advice from industry bodies including the Planning Institute of Australia's WA chapter is straightforward: name and compress image files before upload, avoid uploading duplicates across multiple application stages, and use the portal's own version-history function where available. It is a workaround, not a solution — but until a deduplication program is funded and operational, it is the best the system currently offers.