Perth's duplicate image problem: what happens next and the key decisions ahead

Western Australian public institutions are facing a crunch point over how they manage duplicate and misidentified images held across government digital archives, with decisions made in the next six to twelve months likely to determine whether years of digitisation investment pays off or compounds existing problems.

The issue sits at the intersection of two forces reshaping public administration in Perth right now: a state government flush with iron ore royalties and spending heavily on digital infrastructure, and a broader push by agencies from the City of Perth to the State Records Office of Western Australia to open their holdings to public access. Duplicate images — the same photograph or document scanned multiple times, often with conflicting metadata — quietly undermine both goals.

Why this matters in WA right now

The State Library of Western Australia, based on the Perth Cultural Centre in Northbridge, has been expanding its digital collections under a multi-year program that predates the current Labor government but has accelerated under recent budget allocations. The Battye Library's pictorial collections alone run to hundreds of thousands of items, and archivists have long flagged that deduplication — systematically identifying and removing or merging duplicate records — has lagged well behind the rate of new digitisation.

Perth's heritage sector is not alone in this. Institutions nationally have grappled with the same problem as scanning volumes outpaced cataloguing capacity. But WA's position is specific: the state's resources boom funded rapid collection growth in the 2000s and 2010s, and digital storage was cheap enough that the default was often to keep everything rather than make hard calls about what to retire or merge.

The practical consequence is real. A researcher at the J.S. Battye Library or a council heritage officer in Subiaco pulling images for a planning submission or an AUKUS-related heritage impact assessment at HMAS Stirling on Garden Island can encounter the same photograph catalogued under three different dates, two different photographers, and inconsistent copyright status. That is not a minor inconvenience — it creates legal exposure and can delay approvals.

The decisions that will define the outcome

Three specific choices now sit in front of decision-makers. The first is whether to adopt automated deduplication tools or pursue a labour-intensive manual review. Automated systems using perceptual hashing — software that identifies near-identical images even when file names differ — can process thousands of records a day, but they require upfront licensing costs and generate their own errors that still need human review. Some smaller councils in the eastern suburbs, including those managing local history collections in the Kalamunda district, have trialled these tools with mixed results.

The second decision is governance: which body owns the problem. The State Records Office of Western Australia holds statutory responsibility for government records, but digital image collections held by libraries, museums and local governments operate under a patchwork of policies. Without a single coordinating authority, deduplication projects at one agency can simply shift the inconsistency rather than resolve it.

The third is funding. Western Australia's 2025-26 state budget allocated additional resources to the Department of the Premier and Cabinet's digital government programs, though specific line items for archival deduplication have not been publicly broken out. With the state still running a significant surplus on the back of iron ore prices that have held above USD 90 per tonne through the first half of 2026, there is an argument that now — before a commodity correction — is the moment to invest in back-end infrastructure that rarely makes headlines but underpins everything else.

For institutions sitting on the fence, the calculus is shifting. Metronet's expansion through the inner suburbs is already triggering heritage impact assessments in corridors from Bayswater to Morley, generating demand for reliable, deduplicated photographic records of streetscapes and built form. The AUKUS submarine pathway work centred on Henderson and Stirling is adding to that pressure. Archivists and records managers who have flagged the duplicate image problem for years say the pipeline of demand from major infrastructure projects is finally giving them the leverage to push for a coordinated fix. The question is whether agencies move before the next round of assessments lands on their desks, or scramble to catch up after the fact.