By the Numbers: Perth's Duplicate Image Problem Is Costing Councils and Businesses More Than They Realise

Duplicate image files are piling up inside Western Australian government systems, real estate databases and infrastructure project archives at a rate that is starting to show up in storage bills and project budgets. Across Greater Perth, organisations that digitised records rapidly during the pandemic years are now confronting a sprawling backlog of redundant image data — and the cost of cleaning it up is measurable.

The timing matters because of where Perth sits right now. The WA state government is managing concurrent pressures: Metronet rail corridor documentation, AUKUS-related planning submissions centred on HMAS Stirling at Garden Island, and a housing approval surge driven by immigration demand that has pushed the Fremantle and Burswood development pipelines to near-record volumes. Every one of those streams generates thousands of image files — site photos, heritage scans, engineering diagrams — and duplication rates across enterprise content management systems commonly run above 30 per cent, according to published benchmarks from storage analytics firm Aparavi, which released a 2024 industry report on unstructured data redundancy.

What the Data Actually Shows

The scale of the problem is easier to understand with specific numbers. The WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage processed more than 14,000 development applications in the 2023–24 financial year, a figure the department published in its annual report. Each application typically contains multiple image attachments — photographs, site plans, heritage overlays — and when applicants resubmit revised documents, original image files are rarely purged. Industry estimates suggest that for every 1 terabyte of legitimate image data in a local government content system, between 300 and 500 gigabytes consists of exact or near-exact duplicates. At current AWS S3 storage pricing of roughly USD $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard tier, a mid-sized Perth council sitting on 10 terabytes of planning imagery could be paying for 3 to 5 terabytes of purely redundant data every single month.

The City of Stirling and the City of Swan — two of Perth's largest local governments by land area — both operate significant digital document management systems that ingest high volumes of imagery tied to subdivision approvals, ranger reports and infrastructure inspections. Neither has publicly released a duplicate-image audit, but both councils fall within the scope of the State Records Act 2000 (WA), which requires that records be maintained in ways that avoid unnecessary duplication. The gap between legislative intent and operational reality is where costs accumulate.

Real estate is another pressure point. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia reported in early 2025 that Perth's property listing volumes were running at elevated levels relative to the decade average, driven by investor activity in suburbs like Baldivis, Ellenbrook and Alkimos. Each listing generates between 15 and 40 images. When agents re-list properties — common in a volatile market — old image sets frequently remain in the backend database of platforms such as reiwa.com rather than being retired. Over a 12-month period across a major listings portal, that duplication compounds into tens of thousands of redundant files.

Fixing It: Tools, Timelines and What Comes Next

Duplicate image replacement — the process of identifying redundant files, selecting a canonical version and retiring the rest — has matured considerably as a technical discipline. Perceptual hashing algorithms, which compare images based on visual similarity rather than exact file matching, can now process large archives at speeds that make a full audit of a council's image library feasible within days rather than months. Open-source tools like ImageHash and commercial platforms such as Cloudinary's asset management suite both offer this functionality.

For Perth-based organisations, the practical first step is a storage audit scoped to image file types — JPEG, PNG, TIFF and PDF-embedded rasters account for the bulk of redundancy in most planning and property systems. Organisations operating under WA government procurement frameworks can access the GITC (Government Information Technology Conditions) panel for digital services providers who offer data remediation work.

The broader push toward cloud-native infrastructure under the WA Government's Digital Strategy 2025–2028 will eventually force a reckoning with legacy duplication. Migrating dirty data to a new cloud environment doesn't clean it — it just charges you more per gigabyte to store the mess in a shinier location. Getting the numbers right before that migration begins is the cheaper option by a significant margin.