Perth Agencies Race to Purge Duplicate Images From Digital Archives This Week

Perth's property, government and cultural sectors moved this week to tackle a long-ignored drag on their digital infrastructure: duplicate images clogging content management systems, inflating storage costs and slowing public-facing websites. The push, accelerating across several organisations simultaneously, reflects growing pressure to tighten operational budgets as the WA state government enters a period of tighter capital allocation following years of iron ore-fuelled surplus spending.

The timing is not accidental. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, which manages imagery across dozens of statutory planning portals covering suburbs from Joondalup to Armadale, confirmed this week it was mid-way through a structured audit of its digital asset management system. The audit, which began in late June 2026, targets redundant property photographs uploaded across multiple planning scheme amendment submissions — files that, in some cases, appear three or four times under different file names.

Why Duplicate Images Have Become a Budget Problem

Storage is not free. Cloud hosting costs for state government agencies in WA have climbed steadily since the Digital Strategy for the WA Public Sector was adopted, and departments are now being held to tighter per-terabyte accountability. Duplicate image files — particularly high-resolution photographs from heritage assessments, infrastructure projects and public consultation campaigns — can account for a disproportionate share of that overhead.

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, based on St Georges Terrace in the CBD, has separately flagged the issue to member agencies after a review of listing platforms found that residential properties marketed through multiple portals routinely generate between six and twelve copies of the same facade photograph across syndicated feeds. For a mid-sized agency managing three hundred active listings, that multiplication effect can push storage demand well beyond what the agency's original contract anticipated.

Meanwhile, the State Records Office of Western Australia, located in the Alexander Library Building on Francis Street, is working through a separate but related challenge. Digital records submitted as part of the Metronet rail expansion project — now covering corridor documentation from Morley to Ellenbrook and Yanchep — include engineering site photographs that were uploaded at multiple stages of the approval process, creating layered duplication across the state's permanent archive. Staff have been working since early July to implement automated hash-matching tools that can identify pixel-identical files regardless of filename or upload date.

Tools, Costs and What Agencies Are Actually Doing

The practical response varies by organisation. Several Perth-based digital agencies working with local government clients on the Swan Coastal Plain have moved toward perceptual hashing software — tools that can identify visually similar images even when they have been lightly cropped or recompressed — rather than relying on exact file-size matching, which misses most real-world duplicates. Licences for enterprise-grade tools in this category typically run between $8,000 and $25,000 annually depending on library size, figures that smaller councils are finding difficult to absorb without state subsidy.

The City of Stirling, one of Perth's largest local governments by population, is understood to be evaluating options for its corporate image library following a recent infrastructure audit, though no procurement decision has been publicly announced. The City of Perth, which manages extensive photographic records of the CBD precinct including Murray Street and the Elizabeth Quay foreshore, updated its digital asset policy in March 2026 to require filename standardisation on all new uploads — a modest but practical step toward preventing fresh duplication even before existing backlogs are resolved.

For businesses and organisations still in the early stages of addressing this, the advice from digital asset specialists is consistent: begin with an automated scan before committing staff hours to manual review. Free and low-cost tools exist for libraries under fifty thousand files. Beyond that threshold, the manual approach typically costs more in staff time than a commercial licence would. Any organisation holding imagery related to heritage, planning or infrastructure should also confirm with the State Records Office whether retention obligations apply before deleting files flagged as duplicates — some copies may be legally required as separate version records under the State Records Act 2000.