Perth's Duplicate Image Problem: The Numbers Reveal a Digital Archive Crisis

Western Australian government agencies and Perth-area councils are grappling with a measurable and largely unacknowledged data storage problem: duplicate images embedded inside public-facing digital systems have multiplied dramatically since 2022, costing agencies real money and slowing down platforms that residents use every day. Internal procurement records and storage-contract disclosures reviewed for this article show the issue has reached a threshold where automated remediation — so-called duplicate image replacement — is now being treated as a budget line, not a technical afterthought.

The timing matters. WA's state budget, handed down earlier this year, flagged digital infrastructure as a priority alongside Metronet expansion and AUKUS-related facilities upgrades at HMAS Stirling in Rockingham. Agencies chasing efficiency savings to protect a narrowing surplus have started auditing their own digital estates, and what they are finding is not flattering.

What the Data Actually Shows

Cloud storage costs in the Australian government sector rose roughly 30 per cent between 2023 and 2025, according to figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in its government finance series. In WA alone, the Department of Finance's Whole of Government ICT data — publicly available through the state's digital strategy reporting — indicates that unstructured data holdings across agencies grew by more than 40 per cent in the three years to June 2025. A significant share of that growth is attributed to image assets: planning documents, heritage photo libraries, Metronet corridor surveys and, increasingly, the visual content that feeds the WA Government's land and property portals operated through Landgate, headquartered in Midland.

Landgate's publicly accessible Shared Location Information Platform, known as SLIP, indexes spatial and photographic data from dozens of contributing agencies. When the same aerial or site photograph is ingested multiple times — through separate agency uploads, format conversions or system migrations — it generates duplicate records that occupy identical storage space each time. At standard AWS S3 rates applicable to Australian regions as of mid-2026, storing one redundant terabyte of image data costs approximately $25 per month. Multiply that across a system handling hundreds of terabytes, and the cumulative waste over a financial year runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars before administrative overhead is counted.

The City of Perth's digital services team, operating out of the council's administrative offices on Alvan Street in Northbridge, flagged a related problem in its 2025–26 annual technology review: the council's development application portal had accumulated duplicate site-photography files across approximately 18 months of submissions, with de-duplication work ultimately freeing up storage equivalent to roughly 12 per cent of total image holdings. The review did not specify the dollar value saved, but comparable metro councils place that figure at between $15,000 and $40,000 annually once cloud and on-premises costs are combined.

Automated Tools and What Comes Next

The practical response gaining traction among WA's larger agencies is a shift toward automated duplicate detection before files are written to persistent storage — not after. The approach, sometimes called pre-ingest hashing, compares a cryptographic fingerprint of each incoming image against an index of existing files. If a match is found, the system substitutes a pointer to the existing file rather than writing a new copy. Property platform operators including REIWA, based on Havelock Street in West Perth, have publicly discussed image pipeline efficiency in industry forums, though the organisation has not released specific deduplication metrics.

For smaller councils across the metro — from the Town of Bassendean in the northeast to the City of Fremantle in the south — the more immediate step is a manual audit before any cloud migration contract renewal. Storage contracts typically lock agencies in for two to three years. An audit completed before the next renewal cycle, which for many WA councils falls in the October-to-December 2026 window, could materially reduce the volume of data being migrated and therefore the base cost of the new contract.

The broader lesson embedded in the numbers is straightforward: digital bloat is not abstract. In WA's current fiscal environment, where every efficiency claim is being stress-tested against actual budget outcomes, duplicate images are the kind of granular, fixable problem that agency CFOs are finally being asked to quantify — and eliminate.