Perth Lags Behind Singapore and Amsterdam on Duplicate Image Cleanup — But a Local Push Is Underway

Perth's local government sector is sitting on hundreds of thousands of duplicate digital images — photographs, scanned planning documents, aerial shots, and streetscape records stored across overlapping Council and state agency systems — and a coordinated effort to fix it is still in early stages. The City of Perth, Landgate, and the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage each maintain separate image repositories that analysts say share substantial overlap, creating storage cost blowouts and complicating public records access.

The issue has become urgent for one specific reason: the WA state government's Metronet rail expansion program, now the largest infrastructure project in the state's history, is generating tens of thousands of new planning images every month. Engineers, heritage assessors, and community consultation teams across corridors from Ellenbrook to Byford are uploading photos to at least four different platforms, often with no deduplication protocol in place. Without a fix, the archive becomes unworkable within years rather than decades.

How Other Cities Are Handling It

Singapore moved early. The Urban Redevelopment Authority there completed a centralised image deduplication project across its OneMap platform in 2023, consolidating records from more than a dozen agencies into a single cloud-managed repository. Amsterdam followed a similar path, with the Gemeente Amsterdam completing a phased digital asset rationalisation across its City Archives and spatial planning databases by early 2025. Both cities adopted perceptual hashing technology — software that identifies visually similar images even when file names, formats, or metadata differ — as the backbone of their systems.

Melbourne's City of Melbourne began trialling a comparable tool through its Smart City Office in late 2024, targeting roughly 2.3 million images held across its property and infrastructure records. Auckland has integrated deduplication into its Kāinga Ora housing delivery pipeline, partly to manage the volume of site photographs generated by its large-scale suburban development program. Perth has no equivalent program at the city-wide level as of July 2026.

The City of Vincent in inner-north Perth and the Town of Claremont have each separately adopted cloud storage platforms — Microsoft Azure and AWS respectively — that include built-in deduplication at the file level. But file-level deduplication catches only exact copies; it does nothing about near-identical images taken seconds apart, a category that makes up the bulk of the problem in planning and infrastructure photography.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Storage is not cheap at government scale. Cloud storage pricing for large public sector contracts in Australia generally sits in the range of $20 to $35 per terabyte per month, depending on retrieval tiers and contract terms — figures consistent with published AWS and Azure government pricing schedules. An agency holding several hundred terabytes of redundant image data is paying a recurring cost that compounds year on year. Landgate, which manages the state's land information system from its offices in Midland, has not publicly quantified its duplicate image volume.

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage operates out of 140 William Street in the CBD. A spokesperson's office confirmed the department is aware of the issue but directed questions to a forthcoming digital records review — a review that, according to documents tabled in the WA Legislative Assembly in March 2026, is not scheduled for completion until mid-2027.

That timeline puts Perth roughly two to three years behind Singapore's completed rollout and about eighteen months behind Melbourne's current pilot. The gap matters because the Metronet construction peak — the period generating the highest volume of new imagery — runs through 2027 and 2028 across stations from Morley to Lakelands. Images captured during that period will be foundational heritage and planning records for decades. Getting the archive right from the start is considerably cheaper than cleaning it up after the fact.

For residents or small businesses dealing with duplicate images in their own property or development records held by the City of Perth, the practical advice is straightforward: submit a formal records correction request through the City's online service portal, citing the specific property address and document reference numbers. The City's records team at Hay Street processes those requests under the State Records Act 2000, with a standard response time of 45 business days. It is slow, but it works — and right now, it is the most reliable path Perth has.