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

Perth's public agencies and private businesses are sitting on vast archives stuffed with duplicate images — and the cost of doing nothing about it is no longer theoretical. Across the local government sector, digitisation projects funded under the State Records Office of Western Australia framework have produced libraries running into the tens of millions of files, with industry estimates suggesting duplicate image rates in large institutional archives routinely fall between 15 and 40 per cent of total stored assets.

The timing matters. WA's resources boom, the Metronet rail expansion rolling out across suburbs from Yanchep to Ellenbrook, and a sharp uptick in AUKUS-related infrastructure documentation at HMAS Stirling in Garden Island have all generated enormous volumes of photographic and geospatial records over the past three years. When agencies duplicate images across multiple databases — a common outcome of siloed project management — storage costs compound and retrieval accuracy drops.

What the Data Actually Shows

Cloud storage pricing in Australia sat at roughly $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard-tier object storage as of mid-2026, according to publicly listed rates from major providers. That figure sounds trivial until you scale it to a mid-sized Perth local government authority holding, say, 80 terabytes of asset inspection photographs — a realistic figure for a council managing road and drainage infrastructure across a growth corridor like the City of Wanneroo, which covers more than 1,400 square kilometres of mostly expanding residential land. A duplicate rate of 25 per cent on that archive means roughly 20 terabytes of redundant data, translating to a recurring monthly storage cost of approximately $460 for content that delivers zero operational value.

The Landgate facility in Midland — WA's central repository for spatial and property data — has publicly described ongoing work to improve data consistency across its holdings. The broader challenge it reflects is sector-wide: when records are ingested from multiple field sources, from drone surveys to smartphone site inspections, identical or near-identical images accumulate without automatic deduplication checks in place. The Western Australian Local Government Association, based on St Georges Terrace in the CBD, has flagged data governance as a priority theme in its digital transformation agenda for member councils, though no single statewide deduplication mandate currently exists.

Perth's Growth Is Making the Problem Worse

Housing approvals in metropolitan Perth have run at elevated levels through 2025 and into 2026, driven by immigration-linked demand and the state government's land release program across the Alkimos, Eglinton and Brabham corridors. Each new subdivision generates planning, environmental, and construction photographic records spread across state agency systems, developer platforms, and local authority databases — frequently without a single point of truth. Analysts who study document management systems describe this as a classic duplication cascade: the same aerial photograph of a development site can legitimately sit in four separate databases simultaneously, each held by a different agency with a legitimate reason to store it.

The practical fix most specialists point to involves perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a compact digital fingerprint for each image, allowing near-identical files to be flagged even when file names, formats, or metadata differ. Several Perth-based technology firms operating out of the Spacecubed innovation hub on St Georges Terrace and the Curtin University commercialisation network in Bentley have built deduplication tools tailored to local government records management workflows. Uptake has been gradual, in part because procurement cycles at WA councils can stretch 18 months from business case to implementation.

For organisations not yet running any deduplication process, the immediate step is an audit. A baseline scan of any archive larger than one terabyte will almost certainly surface redundancy rates high enough to justify a formal deduplication project on storage savings alone, before any productivity argument is even made. For councils preparing 2026-27 budgets under the WA government's current fiscal framework — one shaped by a multi-billion-dollar iron ore royalty surplus — the business case has rarely been easier to make. The numbers, as they so often do, make the argument themselves.