Perth Councils and Agencies Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Digital Records This Week

Perth's local government sector is dealing with a concrete, unglamorous problem that quietly distorts thousands of public records: duplicate images embedded in digital asset management systems. This week, at least three metropolitan councils confirmed they are working through backlog audits after software tools flagged thousands of repeated or misassigned photographs across planning portals and property databases.

The issue is not new, but it has become harder to ignore. With the Cook government's Metronet rail expansion generating fresh development applications along the Yanchep, Thornlie-Cockburn, and Morley-Ellenbrook lines, councils from Wanneroo in the north to Armadale in the south are processing more digital submissions than at any point in the past decade. Every application carries attached imagery — site photos, elevation renders, heritage documentation — and systems that were built for lighter workloads are showing the strain.

What Triggered the Current Round of Audits

The immediate trigger was a procurement review completed in late June 2026 by the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, which found that duplicate image files were contributing to storage inefficiencies and, more seriously, to instances where the wrong photograph was displayed alongside a planning record on public-access portals. That matters because residents checking a development application for a site in, say, Claremont or Subiaco may have been viewing imagery sourced from an entirely different address — sometimes kilometres away.

The City of Stirling, one of Perth's largest local governments by population, confirmed this week it is running a systematic deduplication pass across its Objective ECM records platform. The city manages planning files for suburbs including Scarborough, Balga, and Innaloo — areas where a surge of medium-density development approvals since 2024 has dramatically increased the volume of uploaded attachments. A city spokeswoman, whose name was not provided, confirmed the audit is underway but declined to put a figure on the number of affected records.

The City of Swan flagged a similar exercise, citing its Development Applications Register, which covers the rapidly growing corridor between Ellenbrook and Midland. The Swan Valley and surrounding growth areas have been among the busiest planning precincts in the state over the past 18 months, driven by land releases tied to infrastructure spending and population growth from skilled migration linked to AUKUS defence contracts and the resources sector.

The Practical Costs — and How Agencies Are Responding

Deduplication is not free. Commercial software licences for enterprise-grade image deduplication tools — products used by larger local governments in New South Wales and Victoria — typically run between $15,000 and $60,000 annually depending on database scale, according to publicly available vendor pricing sheets from suppliers including Laserfiche and OpenText. Smaller Perth councils without those budgets are relying on manual review or open-source tools, a slower approach that can take months to clear a backlog.

The Landgate agency, which maintains the state's authoritative property and cadastral dataset, updated its imagery ingestion protocols in May 2026 as part of its ongoing digital modernisation program. Landgate's public-facing MyAccount portal, used by surveyors, conveyancers, and real estate professionals across Western Australia, now runs automated hash-checking on uploaded files to prevent identical images being registered under different parcel identifiers — a relatively simple fix that other agencies have been slow to replicate.

For ordinary Perth residents, the practical advice is straightforward. Anyone who has submitted a planning application or reviewed one on a council portal in the past 12 months should cross-check that the imagery displayed matches the actual site. Discrepancies can be reported directly to the relevant council's planning records team. In Stirling, that means contacting the Stirling Civic Centre on Coastal Highway in Innaloo. In Swan, the point of contact is the administration building on Albion Street in Midland.

Councils are expected to complete their initial audit passes by the end of August 2026. Whether the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage moves to mandate a statewide deduplication standard — rather than leaving each council to solve the problem independently — is a question the sector will be watching through the second half of the year.