Perth's Duplicate Image Problem: The Numbers Exposing a Digital Filing Crisis Across WA's Public Sector

Western Australia's government agencies collectively hold tens of thousands of duplicate digital images across their records management systems — a largely invisible problem that is now generating measurable costs as the state's population surge drives record demand for planning approvals, infrastructure permits and housing documentation.

The issue is pressing because Perth is not a static city right now. The Department of Communities processed more housing applications in the 2024–25 financial year than any comparable period since the post-GST construction boom of the early 2000s, according to state budget papers released in May 2026. Every one of those applications generates attached image files — site photos, architectural renders, heritage overlays — and without systematic deduplication protocols, the same image can exist in three or four separate folders across a single agency's network.

What the Data Actually Shows

Industry benchmarks from digital asset management research consistently find that between 20 and 40 per cent of files stored in large organisational repositories are exact or near-exact duplicates. Apply that range to a mid-sized WA government agency running, say, 50 terabytes of active image storage, and you are looking at 10 to 20 terabytes of redundant data — storage that costs money to maintain, back up and secure.

Landgate, the WA land information authority headquartered on Midland Gate Drive in Midland, manages some of the state's most image-intensive datasets, including aerial photography, cadastral mapping imagery and satellite captures tied to the State Land Information Platform. Landgate's annual report for 2024–25 notes the agency manages petabyte-scale spatial data holdings. Even a conservative 15 per cent duplication rate across imagery alone represents a substantial volume of avoidable overhead.

The City of Perth, whose IT infrastructure supports everything from CCTV footage archives along the Hay Street Mall to development application imagery for projects in Northbridge and East Perth, is understood to be among the local governments that have begun formal audits of their digital asset libraries. The City of Stirling — WA's most populous local government area, covering suburbs from Osborne Park to Scarborough — has similarly been working through a digital records modernisation program that flags deduplication as a priority line item.

The numbers get sharper when you factor in the AUKUS effect. The build-up around HMAS Stirling on Garden Island and the associated defence contracting ecosystem in Henderson is generating thousands of engineering drawings, site survey images and compliance photographs monthly. Defence-adjacent contractors operating under federal procurement rules must retain original and version-controlled copies, but duplication within those retained sets — different file names, same pixel content — is a known and documented inefficiency in large project environments.

What Gets Lost When Duplicates Go Unchecked

The practical consequences run deeper than storage bills. When a planning officer at the City of Wanneroo searches for the most current site photograph for a subdivision off Wanneroo Road and retrieves three versions with different file-stamp dates, decision times blow out. That is not a hypothetical: a 2025 survey of local government digital records practices conducted by the Local Government Information Technology Association of WA found that staff in planning and building departments ranked duplicate or mislabelled files among the top three causes of internal workflow delays.

Automated deduplication tools — software that compares image hash values rather than file names — have dropped sharply in price over the past four years. Enterprise-grade solutions that cost upwards of $80,000 to license annually in 2021 are now available to mid-sized organisations for under $20,000 a year, with some open-source options deployable at near-zero licensing cost.

The WA Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028, published by the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, identifies data quality and asset lifecycle management as foundational priorities. Agencies seeking Treasury-approved ICT investment through the Digital Investment Review Board are now expected to demonstrate that storage requests account for deduplication efficiency measures before sign-off.

For Perth's local governments and state agencies, the immediate practical step is commissioning a baseline audit — establishing exactly how many duplicate images exist before arguing for new storage capacity. With the state's Metronet expansion generating fresh waves of construction imagery from Ellenbrook to Yanchep, and housing approvals showing no sign of easing, the duplication backlog will only compound. Fixing it is cheaper now than it will be in 2027.