Perth Is Quietly Solving Its Duplicate Image Problem — Here's How It Stacks Up Against Singapore and Amsterdam

Perth's land and property sector has a clutter problem. Thousands of duplicate images — identical or near-identical photographs recycled across real estate listings, council permit portals and infrastructure planning files — are clogging databases managed by agencies from the City of Perth to the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage on Victoria Avenue. The scale of the problem is not unique to Western Australia, but how this city is responding to it is starting to look meaningfully different from peers in Singapore and Amsterdam.

The timing matters. WA is in the middle of a housing demand surge driven by population growth tied to AUKUS defence contracts, Metronet construction activity and a resources sector still running hot on iron ore royalties. More development applications, more property churn, more listing photos — and, critically, more duplicated visual records piling up inside systems that were not designed to handle the volume. The State Government's 2025-26 budget allocated funds toward digital infrastructure modernisation across multiple agencies, and duplicate image management has surfaced as a practical, if unglamorous, bottleneck inside that broader project.

What Perth Is Actually Doing

The City of Stirling and the City of Wanneroo, both of which have absorbed significant residential development pressure over the past three years, have been piloting automated deduplication tools inside their asset management and planning approval workflows since late 2025. The approach relies on perceptual hashing — a method that fingerprints images by visual content rather than file name — to flag redundant uploads before they enter permanent storage. The goal is less about aesthetics and more about system performance: duplicate images inflate storage costs, slow search retrieval and introduce version-control errors when planning officers compare site photos across multiple applications for the same lot.

Landgate, the state agency that manages WA's land title and spatial information systems and operates from its Midland office on Midland Square, has been running a parallel audit of its aerial and cadastral image libraries. The agency has not publicly released figures on how many duplicates have been identified, but the deduplication exercise forms part of a broader spatial data refresh tied to the Indian Ocean Strategy and defence precinct planning around HMAS Stirling on Garden Island.

REIWA, the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, has flagged the issue from a commercial angle. Perth's median house price sat at roughly $785,000 as of the March 2026 quarter, and the volume of new listings coming through northern corridor suburbs like Ellenbrook and Alkimos has pushed listing image volumes well beyond what agencies were managing five years ago. Duplicated hero images — the main photograph on a listing — distort automated valuation models that rely on visual data to cross-reference comparable sales.

Singapore and Amsterdam Are Further Along, But Not by Much

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority integrated perceptual deduplication into its development control portal in 2023, processing roughly 1.2 million planning-related images annually through an automated pipeline that rejects duplicates at the point of upload. The system reduced manual review time inside the portal by an estimated 34 percent in its first full year of operation, according to figures the URA published in its 2024 annual report.

Amsterdam's approach has been more federated. The Gemeente Amsterdam runs deduplication checks across its heritage and building inspection image archives — a particularly high-stakes task given the density of protected canal-belt structures — but the city's property listing ecosystem, dominated by private platforms such as Funda, operates under separate rules. The result is a split system that planners there have described publicly as functional but imperfect.

Perth's position sits somewhere between the two. The city has the regulatory levers — Landgate's centralised role, the state government's appetite for digital infrastructure spending, and a planning system that routes most significant development through a small number of agencies — but the coordination between local governments, state bodies and private listing platforms remains patchy.

The practical upshot for property owners, developers and anyone lodging a planning application in Perth right now: compress and rename your images before upload, avoid resubmitting photos from previous applications, and check whether your council's portal flags duplicates on submission. The City of Perth's development application portal on Forrest Place does provide upload warnings in some file categories. For the broader fix, the work is underway — it just hasn't finished yet.