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

Perth's land title office processed more than 94,000 property transactions in the 2024–25 financial year, and somewhere inside that volume lies a headache that digital administrators rarely discuss publicly: thousands of duplicate images sitting across multiple databases, slowing searches, inflating storage costs and quietly undermining the accuracy of public-facing civic records.

The problem is not unique to Western Australia, but the pace at which it has accelerated here is shaping a local response that borrows from overseas models — and occasionally diverges from them in telling ways.

The surge matters now because three forces have converged simultaneously. Metronet's rolling station rollouts — from Yanchep in the north to Thornlie-Cockburn in the south — have generated continuous waves of new property photography, planning documents and infrastructure imagery uploaded to multiple agencies at once. AUKUS-linked construction activity around HMAS Stirling at Garden Island has added a separate stream of sensitive site imagery requiring careful duplication management. And a housing demand surge, driven partly by immigration-fuelled population growth that pushed Perth's rental vacancy rate below one per cent for much of 2024, has left real estate platforms like REIWA.com hosting property listings where the same building photograph appears under different addresses across different suburb entries.

What Perth Is Actually Doing About It

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage runs the state's core spatial data infrastructure from its Dumas House offices on Harrack Street in West Perth. Staff there have been working since early 2025 on an image-deduplication pipeline integrated with the state's Landgate database — the same repository that feeds suburb boundary data, heritage overlays and subdivision records to councils from Rockingham to Joondalup.

The City of Perth itself uses a content management system procured through the state's whole-of-government digital panel, and IT staff at council level have flagged duplicate assets as a recurring audit finding in recent annual ICT reviews. The Stirling City Centre precinct redevelopment, one of the largest urban renewal corridors in the southern hemisphere by land area, has generated planning portal imagery that appears in at least three separate agency portals — a structural overlap that no single agency has formal responsibility to resolve.

Compare that with Singapore, where the Urban Redevelopment Authority runs a centralised OneMap platform that ingests imagery through a single ingest point, preventing duplication at source. Amsterdam's city digital office adopted a federated hash-matching protocol across its municipal data warehouses in 2023, reducing storage redundancy by roughly 30 per cent within 18 months, according to the city's published annual digital report. Toronto, grappling with a development boom of its own along the Eglinton Crosstown corridor, has mandated image metadata standards for all planning submissions since January 2025 — a step Perth's Department of Planning has not yet formalised.

The Cost and What Comes Next

Storage is not free. The WA government's cloud infrastructure bill, reported in the 2025–26 state budget papers, reflects a broadening digital footprint across agencies — and duplicated image assets are a direct contributor to that footprint. Industry benchmarks from cloud storage auditors suggest that unmanaged duplication in large civic datasets can inflate storage consumption by 15 to 40 per cent, though the precise figure for any individual agency depends heavily on its ingest practices.

Perth's geography adds a local wrinkle. The metro area spans more than 5,900 square kilometres — larger than the entire urbanised footprint of Greater Tokyo — meaning aerial and satellite imagery updated annually by Landgate runs to petabytes of raw data before duplication is even considered. That scale puts Perth closer to Toronto than to compact cities like Singapore or Amsterdam, which have fewer raw images to manage simply because their footprints are smaller.

Practically, property buyers, planning consultants and developers working along corridors like Scarborough Beach Road or the Forrestfield-Airport Link stations should verify that imagery pulled from multiple portals — including the DPLH's Shared Location Information Platform and council GIS viewers — is consistent. Where discrepancies appear, the Landgate helpline at Midland Square remains the authoritative point of contact for rectification requests. The broader fix, however, will depend on whether WA adopts centralised ingest standards before the next Metronet tranche adds another layer of imagery to an already cluttered system.