Perth Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement: 'It's Like Our Streets Were Erased'

Dozens of Perth residents have raised concerns about a quiet but spreading practice: local government bodies and community organisations replacing original neighbourhood photographs with generic stock imagery, a swap that community members say misrepresents their suburbs and undermines civic trust. The issue, known broadly as duplicate image replacement, has drawn criticism from residents in Fremantle, Midland and the northern coastal corridor over the past six months.

The timing matters. Western Australia's Metronet rail expansion has triggered a wave of urban renewal communications, with the Department of Transport and various local councils producing updated digital and print materials for communities along the new lines. When those materials go to tender or refresh, original photography — commissioned during earlier rounds of community consultation — is often swapped out for cheaper licensed stock images, sometimes showing streets or architecture that bear no resemblance to the actual neighbourhood being described.

Fremantle and Midland Feel the Pinch

In Fremantle, members of a local heritage advocacy group began documenting the changes in January 2026 after noticing that an online City of Fremantle planning portal had replaced photographs of the South Terrace café strip and the Fishing Boat Harbour precinct with images sourced from stock libraries. One replaced photograph had originally been commissioned as part of the 2023 Fremantle Futures community engagement program. Residents reported that the new images showed unfamiliar streetscapes that appeared to be from the eastern states or overseas, making consultation documents feel disconnected from the actual local environment.

Midland has seen similar complaints. Community members near the Midland Gate shopping precinct and along Clayton Street raised concerns at a Town of Bassendean council meeting in April 2026, arguing that replacement imagery used in a local planning newsletter failed to reflect the suburb's mixed industrial and residential character. One attendee, a long-term Clayton Street resident, described feeling as if the neighbourhood had been made invisible in its own official communications, according to minutes from that meeting published on the council's website.

The problem is not unique to Perth, but it is sharpened here by the pace of development. Western Australia's population grew by roughly 3.4 per cent in the 12 months to June 2025, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, adding pressure on councils to produce communications quickly and often on constrained budgets. Stock imagery platforms, which charge as little as $15 per image on entry-level licensing plans compared to hundreds of dollars for commissioned local photography, make the cost case obvious to procurement teams under budget pressure.

What Communities Are Asking For

Advocacy groups in the City of Stirling and the Bayswater area have started calling on councils to adopt what they describe as a local-image-first policy for any publicly funded planning or infrastructure communications. The ask is straightforward: when a document describes a specific suburb, street or project site, it should use photographs taken in that location. If original images need replacing for technical reasons — low resolution, rights expiry, duplication across platforms — the replacement should be sourced locally, not from a generic library.

The City of Stirling, which administers a large swath of suburbs from Scarborough to Inglewood and manages significant community engagement around the ongoing METRONET Morley-Ellenbrook Line corridor, has not publicly committed to such a policy as of the date of publication. Requests for comment submitted to the council communications team on 3 July 2026 had not received a response by deadline.

For now, residents are doing the documentation work themselves. Community Facebook groups in suburbs including Maylands, Victoria Park and Belmont have begun archiving original council imagery before updates go live, creating informal records that can be used to flag discrepancies. The Midland-based Swan Valley Photography Collective has offered pro bono support to at least two community organisations looking to build local image libraries as an alternative to stock platforms.

Anyone who believes their suburb has been misrepresented in official council or government materials can lodge a formal feedback submission through their local government's community engagement portal, or contact their ward councillor directly with documented examples before the next round of Metronet communications materials is released, expected in the third quarter of 2026.