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

Perth's local governments are sitting on tens of thousands of duplicate property images lodged through digital planning portals, a legacy of a rushed pandemic-era push to move development applications online. The City of Perth and several outer metropolitan councils have quietly begun auditing their document management systems in 2026, flagging the problem as a growing drag on assessment timelines and storage costs.

The issue matters now because WA's housing pipeline is under enormous pressure. The state government's Metronet expansion is opening new transit corridors through suburbs like Bayswater, Belmont and Ellenbrook, triggering a wave of infill development applications. Each one arrives with supporting photo packages — site surveys, streetscape shots, shadow diagrams — and when applicants re-submit amended plans, duplicate image sets accumulate inside council systems with no automated deduplication layer to catch them. Planning officers end up manually sorting through folders before they can assess a proposal.

What Perth Is Actually Doing

The City of Stirling, which processes one of the highest volumes of residential development applications in the metropolitan area, adopted a new document management protocol in January 2026 that flags files sharing identical metadata hashes at the point of upload. The system, integrated into its existing InfoCouncil platform, does not delete files automatically — officers review flagged duplicates before any removal. That cautious approach reflects a real concern: in planning disputes, image timestamps can become evidence, and premature deletion has legal consequences.

Further south, the City of Fremantle has been running a parallel project through its records and information governance team, based at the administration centre on Kings Square. Fremantle's approach leans on a quarterly batch-review process rather than real-time flagging, which is cheaper to implement but slower to clear the backlog. Staff there began the audit in March 2026, working through applications lodged between 2020 and 2024 — the four years when digital submissions surged but deduplication standards did not exist.

Neither council provided specific figures on how many duplicate images have been identified, and requests for that data were still being processed at time of publication.

How Peers Overseas Are Handling It

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority has operated a centralised GovTech-integrated submissions platform since 2021 that runs SHA-256 hash checking at upload, rejecting exact duplicates before they enter the system at all. The difference is structural: Singapore runs planning submissions through a single national portal, which makes uniform deduplication policy straightforward. Perth, like most Australian cities, operates across dozens of independent local government systems with varying technical capacity.

Amsterdam's planning department moved in 2023 to a cloud-hosted system built on the Dutch government's Common Ground architecture, which includes automated image deduplication as a baseline feature. The city publicly reported in its 2024 digital infrastructure review that storage costs for planning records fell after deduplication tools were introduced, though the authority did not publish a specific dollar figure for the saving.

Toronto faces a closer analogy to Perth. The city's 311 service and development application portal — managed by Toronto Building — grappled with duplicate submissions throughout 2022 and 2023 as pandemic backlogs cleared. The city's solution was largely manual: a dedicated triage team worked through flagged files over an 18-month period. Toronto Building's 2024 annual report noted the process had improved average application processing times, without specifying the image deduplication component separately.

Perth's fragmented approach — different solutions across different councils, no state-level standard — puts it closer to the Toronto model than the Singapore one. The WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has been developing its ePlanning portal since 2019, but a unified image-handling standard for all metropolitan councils has not yet been announced as part of that program.

For anyone lodging a development application in Perth right now, the practical advice is straightforward: submit a single, clearly labelled image package and do not re-upload the same files with a fresh submission. Councils including Stirling and Fremantle have confirmation-of-receipt systems that generate a reference number — keep it, because it is the fastest way to resolve any dispute about what was actually lodged and when. The backlog is being cleared, but it will take time, and applications caught in the middle of an audit review can sit longer than the standard statutory timeframe allows.