Perth Councils and Agencies Race to Scrub Duplicate Images From Public Records This Week

Several Perth metropolitan councils and at least one state government agency have this week begun formal audits to identify and replace duplicate images embedded in their public-facing digital records, planning documents and community consultation portals — a housekeeping task that has taken on fresh urgency as Metronet project documentation continues to expand across multiple platforms.

The immediate trigger is practical. As the WA Labor government's Metronet rail expansion pushes through suburbs including Ellenbrook, Morley and Cannington, planning authorities have been uploading corridor maps, station renders and heritage site photographs to multiple databases simultaneously. The result, according to records management professionals who work with local government in WA, is a growing tangle of near-identical or outright duplicate files that inflate storage costs, create version-control headaches and — most critically — risk presenting outdated imagery to residents making submissions on development proposals.

What Went Wrong and Where

The City of Stirling and the City of Bayswater are among the councils whose digital asset libraries have grown most rapidly over the past two years, partly because both sit along active Metronet and AUKUS-adjacent infrastructure corridors. The Stirling Naval Base precinct in particular has generated a large volume of planning imagery as Defence Housing Australia and private developers have lodged applications around Rockingham and Garden Island. When the same aerial photograph or architectural render is lodged with a council, uploaded to the state's WAPC ePlanning portal and then republished on a project-specific community engagement site, duplicate detection software frequently fails to flag the copies because file names are changed at each step.

Records management firm TIMG, which holds contracts with several WA local governments, flagged the issue in a circular distributed to clients in late June 2026. The circular noted that manual reconciliation of image libraries — rather than automated deduplication — remains the most reliable method for government-grade document sets where metadata is inconsistently applied. TIMG did not respond to a request for comment before deadline.

The City of Perth's digital services team began a structured image audit on 30 June, according to a notice posted on the council's intranet, visible to staff at the Council House building on Hay Street. The audit covers images embedded in development application files lodged between January 2024 and June 2026 — a period that coincides with a surge in high-density residential submissions driven by the state's housing demand crisis and population growth fuelled by interstate and overseas migration.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Duplicate imagery is not a trivial administrative nuisance. Under the WA State Records Act 2000, public authorities are required to maintain accurate and accessible records. If a planning file contains two versions of the same site photograph — one from a pre-demolition survey and one taken after — and the wrong image is presented at a Development Assessment Panel hearing, the consequences can include legal challenge and, in serious cases, a void determination.

Cloud storage costs add another layer of pressure. Amazon Web Services pricing for the ap-southeast-2 region — the Sydney zone most commonly used by WA government agencies — means that storing redundant image files at scale is a quantifiable waste of public money. While the precise dollar figure varies by agency, industry benchmarks suggest image deduplication exercises across mid-sized councils typically recover between 15 and 30 per cent of active storage capacity.

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has not confirmed whether it is conducting a parallel audit of the WAPC ePlanning system, and did not respond to questions submitted on Friday morning.

For residents and developers with active applications before Perth councils right now, the practical advice is straightforward: check the document register on your application file, confirm that images attached to your submission carry the correct date stamp and file description, and lodge a written request with the relevant council officer if you spot a mislabelled or duplicated image. Councils are obliged under the Act to correct errors in the record. Leaving it to the audit to catch the problem means waiting — and in a planning system already under strain, waiting has its own costs.