By the Numbers: Perth's Duplicate Image Problem Is Bigger Than You Think

Perth's public sector and private enterprises are sitting on a growing duplicate image problem, with digital asset libraries across the city's government departments, real estate agencies and media organisations bloated by redundant files that consume storage, slow workflows and distort data reporting. The numbers, drawn from industry audits and technology reviews conducted across Western Australia in the past 18 months, tell a story most IT managers would rather not hear.

The timing matters. WA's iron ore and resources boom, the acceleration of AUKUS-related procurement work at Stirling Naval Base in Rockingham, and the Metronet rail expansion across Perth's northern and southern corridors have all generated enormous volumes of digital documentation — engineering renders, progress photography, community consultation imagery — much of it filed, re-filed and duplicated across shared drives without a coherent deduplication strategy in place.

What the Data Actually Shows

Industry benchmarks from digital asset management research published by the International Data Corporation suggest that duplicate and redundant files account for between 25 and 40 per cent of total storage consumption in organisations that lack automated deduplication systems. For a mid-sized Perth government directorate operating a 50-terabyte document environment, that translates to potentially 12 to 20 terabytes of wasted capacity — storage that, at current enterprise cloud pricing, carries a real cost measurable in tens of thousands of dollars annually.

The problem compounds in organisations producing high volumes of photography. The City of Perth, which maintains visual records spanning public events at Langley Park, construction documentation along St Georges Terrace, and community programs from Northbridge to East Perth, produces thousands of images annually across multiple departments. Without a centralised duplicate-detection process, the same image can exist under different filenames across four or five different shared directories — making version control a practical impossibility and audit trails unreliable.

Real estate is another obvious pressure point. Along the Scarborough Beach Road corridor and within the inner-ring suburbs from Subiaco to Victoria Park, agencies managing hundreds of residential listings routinely upload property photographs to multiple platforms — their own website, REIWA, realestate.com.au, and internal CRM systems. An agent handling 30 active listings might generate upward of 1,500 image files in a single month, with duplication rates that industry practitioners estimate at well over 60 per cent across platforms.

Why Perth's Growth Is Making It Worse

The surge in immigration and housing demand across Perth — the city's population grew at a rate that placed it among Australia's fastest-expanding capitals during 2024 and 2025 — has accelerated both real estate photography volumes and the infrastructure documentation demands placed on state agencies. Metronet project managers working out of the Public Transport Authority's offices in Bassendean are coordinating photographic records across more than a dozen active construction sites simultaneously, from the Morley-Ellenbrook Line corridor to Yanchep in the north.

Deduplication is not simply a storage problem. When the same image exists in multiple places under different identifiers, reporting systems count it multiple times. A department trying to audit visual assets for an FOI response or a budget accountability review ends up with inflated figures. A Metronet project archive that claims to hold 45,000 unique progress photographs may, after deduplication, contain closer to 28,000 — a gap that matters when milestone reporting depends on documented evidence of construction phases.

The practical pathway forward is well-established, even if adoption remains patchy. Organisations working with the Digital Transformation Office within the WA Department of the Premier and Cabinet have access to guidance frameworks on digital asset governance. Commercial tools using perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually identical or near-identical images regardless of filename or file size — can process libraries of a million images in under two hours on standard server hardware. Several Perth-based managed service providers operating out of the West Perth and Leederville technology precinct now offer deduplication audits as a standalone service, typically priced between $2,500 and $8,000 depending on library size.

The first step for any organisation is a baseline audit — running a deduplication scan before the next budget cycle to understand the actual scope of waste. The data, once you have it, is rarely comfortable. But it is always useful.