Their Photos Were Replaced Without Warning: Perth Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Problem

Dozens of Perth residents have come forward in recent weeks to describe a frustrating and sometimes costly experience: images they submitted to online platforms, community directories and local council portals have been quietly replaced with duplicate or stock substitutions, leaving business owners, community groups and individual residents scrambling to correct records they thought were settled.

The issue has surfaced at a moment when Perth's population is growing faster than at almost any point in the past two decades. Housing demand linked to AUKUS-related defence workforce expansion at HMAS Stirling in Rockingham, combined with sustained immigration intake, has pushed thousands of new residents and businesses into digital registration systems that were not designed to handle the volume. Errors, including duplicate image replacement, are becoming more visible simply because more people are using these systems more often.

From Fremantle Markets to Mirrabooka: Who Is Getting Caught Out

The complaints are not confined to one part of the city. A stall holder at the Fremantle Markets on South Terrace said her product photography — submitted to a local business aggregator in March 2026 — was replaced within six weeks by a generic image that bore no resemblance to her goods. She discovered the swap only when a customer mentioned the discrepancy. A community hall coordinator in Mirrabooka, whose organisation had uploaded event imagery to a City of Stirling community noticeboard portal, reported a similar experience in May. Neither person could identify which automated process had triggered the replacement.

The Swan Valley Visitor Centre, which manages image assets for dozens of small tourism operators between Midland and Herne Hill, confirmed it had received multiple complaints from members about mismatched photos appearing on third-party travel listing sites during June. Staff there said they had been manually auditing member profiles in response, a process that one centre representative described as time-consuming given the volume of listings involved. No specific quote from that representative is available for publication.

The problem also appears to have affected residents using the State Government's MyAccount portal, through which Western Australians access a range of service registrations. Community members in Balga and Ellenbrook have described uploading identification-adjacent imagery — such as property photos for rates queries — only to find the image field later blank or filled with a placeholder graphic. The Department of Finance, which administers the portal, had not responded to a request for comment by publication time.

What the Evidence Suggests — and What Residents Are Being Told

Precise figures on the scale of the problem are hard to pin down because no single agency tracks duplicate image replacement as a discrete category of error. Consumer Protection WA, based on St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD, handles complaints about misleading digital representations of businesses, but its published data covers broader categories. The agency's most recent annual figures, covering the 2024–25 financial year, recorded more than 4,800 complaints relating to online trading conduct across Western Australia — a category broad enough to include image-related disputes but not specific enough to isolate them.

Web developers working with small businesses in the inner-city suburbs of Leederville and Mount Hawthorn say the culprit in many cases is automated deduplication software used by large listing platforms. When an algorithm detects what it classifies as a duplicate file — sometimes triggered by identical file names rather than identical content — it may replace the image with a cached or stock version. Businesses that reuse standard file-naming conventions, such as "photo1.jpg", are particularly vulnerable.

For residents who have been caught out, the practical steps are relatively straightforward, even if the process is irritating. Renaming image files with unique identifiers before upload reduces the risk of algorithmic misclassification. Taking a screenshot of any confirmed upload, with a visible date and timestamp, creates a record that supports a complaint if replacement occurs. The WA Small Business Development Corporation, which operates a helpline and walk-in service at its Stirling Street office, can assist business owners in lodging formal objections with platform operators. Community organisations with concerns about council-managed portals are encouraged to contact their relevant local government's digital services team directly and request a manual audit of their profile assets.

The broader fix will require platform operators to be more transparent about when and why automated image management processes are triggered — and that pressure, residents say, needs to come from both consumers and regulators.