'It's My Family's History': Perth Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement

Dozens of Perth residents have raised concerns this week after discovering that photographs in several local government digital archives and community notice portals have been quietly swapped out with stock imagery, replacing original neighbourhood-specific pictures with generic file photos. The complaints, which surfaced publicly through community Facebook groups serving Fremantle, Maylands and the City of Stirling, point to what residents describe as a broader problem: the gradual erasure of authentic local visual records during council-led digitisation programs.

The timing matters. Western Australia's state and local governments have been accelerating their shift to consolidated digital platforms over the past 18 months, partly driven by cost-cutting recommendations tied to post-surplus budget planning and partly by the rollout of centralised content management systems across multiple metropolitan councils. When images are migrated between platforms, automated systems sometimes flag lower-resolution originals as non-compliant and substitute them with licensed stock photos — a process that can happen without any human sign-off.

What Residents Are Finding

In Maylands, residents who contribute to the Maylands Precinct Group say original photographs documenting the 2019 redevelopment of the Eighth Avenue streetscape were replaced on the City of Bayswater's community engagement portal with what appears to be a generic suburban shopping strip image sourced from an overseas stock library. The Eighth Avenue precinct is a recognised heritage-adjacent area, and residents say the original images were cited in submissions to the State Heritage Office during the redevelopment consultation period.

In Fremantle, members of the South Fremantle Residents Association say photographs from the Hilton neighbourhood's 2021 community garden project — documenting works at Spofforth Street Reserve — were similarly replaced during a portal upgrade completed earlier this year. The association has written to the City of Fremantle's records management team requesting restoration of the originals, though no formal response has been publicly reported as of Saturday.

The City of Stirling, which manages one of Western Australia's largest metropolitan resident populations across suburbs including Balga, Yokine and Scarborough, uses a proprietary content platform that was updated in March 2026. Several residents active in the Stirling Residents Network online group say they noticed placeholder imagery appearing on consultation pages relating to proposed Metronet corridor planning around the Stirling station precinct. Those images had previously contained photographs taken during community engagement sessions held in 2024.

The Practical Stakes

This is not only a sentimental grievance. Under Western Australia's State Records Act 2000, local governments are required to retain and manage certain categories of records — including those that document community consultation processes — for specified minimum periods. Advocates in the records management field have previously argued, in general terms, that visual documentation of public engagement can constitute part of the formal consultation record, particularly where images are referenced in submissions or meeting minutes.

The City of Perth's own digital archive policy, last publicly updated in 2023, states that original source files must be preserved before any format migration takes place. Whether that obligation has been uniformly applied across smaller councils running third-party platform upgrades is a question several residents say they are now putting directly to their elected representatives ahead of the next round of ordinary council meetings in late July.

For those affected, the practical advice from records managers consulted in general terms is consistent: lodge a formal records access request under the Freedom of Information Act 1992 as quickly as possible, specify the exact URLs or document reference numbers for the affected pages, and request both the current file and any backup or archived version held prior to the platform migration. Councils typically have 45 days to respond to such requests. Community members are also encouraged to contact their ward councillors directly, particularly where the replaced images relate to active planning or heritage proposals, as the substitution may have implications for the integrity of the consultation record before those processes close.

The issue is unlikely to resolve itself through silence. As more Perth councils complete migrations to centralised platforms over the next two financial years, residents who care about the photographic record of their own streets and projects will need to act before the originals are purged entirely from backup servers — a point at which restoration becomes technically impossible.