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

Perth's land titles office, planning portals and real estate databases collectively hold hundreds of thousands of property images — and a growing share of them are duplicates. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has been working through a staged audit of its digital asset library since early 2025, a project prompted partly by the Metronet expansion pushing a wave of new development applications through its systems. The backlog of redundant images, surveyors say, has slowed title transfer processing at the Midland office and created inconsistencies in online planning maps viewed by developers working in corridors from Yanchep to Byford.

The timing matters. Perth's population is absorbing one of the sharpest immigration-driven housing demand surges in its history, with the City of Swan and the City of Wanneroo each fielding record development application volumes this financial year. Duplicate or mismatched property images — aerial surveys filed twice under different cadastral identifiers, or heritage photos attached to wrong lot numbers — create legal risk at settlement and delay subdivision approvals. In a market where a land release in Ellenbrook or Alkimos can move within days, a documentation error costs money.

What Other Cities Are Doing

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority completed a full deduplication of its OneMap image repository in 2023, deploying perceptual hash algorithms across roughly 4.2 million stored assets. Amsterdam's Kadaster, the Dutch land registry, embedded automated duplicate detection directly into its upload pipeline in 2021, cutting redundant file storage by 34 percent in the first year, according to figures the authority published in its 2022 annual report. Toronto's municipal government tied image deduplication to its Open Data portal refresh in late 2024, using a vendor solution from a Canadian geospatial firm to flag near-duplicate aerials before they entered the public record.

Perth has no equivalent end-to-end pipeline yet. Landgate, the state government's land information authority based in Midland, operates a geospatial image archive that is widely regarded as technically sophisticated — its satellite acquisition program and partnerships with Geoscience Australia give it strong raw data — but the deduplication layer remains largely manual or semi-automated. A Landgate spokesperson was not available for comment by deadline. The City of Perth's own digital asset management, covering imagery of the CBD from St Georges Terrace to Northbridge, runs on a separate system again, creating a fragmentation problem that smaller, more centralised cities like Singapore have largely avoided by design.

Real estate portals present a different but related challenge. Domain and REA Group's realestate.com.au both operate duplicate image detection on listings, but the problem surfaces downstream: when listings are archived and re-ingested into council or state heritage databases, duplicates re-enter the public record. Fremantle's heritage-listed precinct around High Street and the West End has been a particular pain point, with multiple surveys of the same Victorian-era buildings filed across different departmental systems over the past decade.

What Comes Next for Perth

The state government's Digital Economy Strategy, which runs to 2027, includes a data quality pillar that nominally covers asset deduplication, but specifics on implementation timelines and budget allocation for image management have not been made public. The Metronet Digital Integration Project, centred on the new Forrestfield-Airport Link corridor, is understood to have prompted internal conversations at the Department of Transport about unified asset records — though no formal deduplication program has been announced.

For property developers and conveyancers working out of offices on St Georges Terrace or in the Stirling Business District, the practical advice from industry bodies has been consistent: cross-check image identifiers against Landgate's Landgate Online portal before relying on any attached visual asset in a title document. The verification step adds time, but the alternative — discovering a mismatched image during settlement — adds far more.

Perth is not falling dramatically behind its peers, but it is not leading them either. Amsterdam and Singapore solved this at the infrastructure level. Perth is still solving it transaction by transaction.