Duplicate Images on Government and Council Websites: The Key Decisions Perth Faces Next

Hundreds of pages across Western Australian government and local council websites are carrying duplicate, mis-attributed or unlicensed images — and the window for cleaning them up without financial exposure is narrowing. Digital asset audits completed across several state agencies in the first half of 2026 have flagged the problem as more than a housekeeping issue, with copyright enforcement actions against Australian public bodies rising steadily since the federal government updated its online publication guidelines in 2024.

The timing matters. The Cook Labor government is spending heavily on digital infrastructure as part of a broader push tied to Metronet communications upgrades and the AUKUS-linked expansion at HMAS Stirling near Rockingham. Both programs require new public-facing web presences, procurement portals and community engagement platforms — all of which need original, correctly licensed visual content. Getting image libraries wrong at launch is far cheaper to fix than after a site goes live at scale.

Where the Pressure Points Are

The City of Perth and the City of Stirling are among the councils that have recently expanded their digital communications footprints, adding event galleries, planning consultation pages and suburb-specific landing pages for services running from Northbridge down to Osborne Park. Each new page multiplies the risk of duplicated stock imagery appearing across multiple URLs — a pattern that both complicates search indexing and, more critically, creates licensing ambiguity when the same image is used under different terms across different sections of the same domain.

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, which manages a large volume of site photography for heritage-listed locations from the Perth CBD through to Fremantle's West End precinct, flagged duplicate image management as a priority in its 2025-26 digital asset review cycle. The review process — which runs through the Government of Western Australia's Shared Services network — identified that manual audits alone are insufficient for sites hosting more than 10,000 assets. Automated de-duplication tools are now being assessed under a procurement process expected to conclude by September 2026.

Stock image licensing in Australia is not cheap. A single mid-tier commercial licence for a Getty Images photograph can run anywhere from $400 to well over $2,000 depending on usage rights and duration. Multiply that by even a modest government image library running to several hundred assets, and the bill for retroactive licensing — if an audit forces a clean-up — can reach six figures quickly. That's before any legal recovery costs if a rights holder pursues a formal claim.

What Happens After the Audit

The immediate decision facing Perth-based digital teams is binary: invest in automated asset management software now, or run manual audits that are cheaper upfront but miss the structural problem. Procurement specialists working within the WA public sector framework have three main software categories in front of them — digital asset management platforms such as Bynder or Canto, de-duplication plugins built into content management systems including Drupal and WordPress, and AI-assisted image recognition tools that can match near-identical crops and colour-adjusted derivatives that a straight file-hash comparison would miss.

For councils operating on tighter technology budgets — Stirling's 2025-26 operating budget was publicly reported at approximately $290 million, with technology a fraction of that — the practical path is likely a phased approach: automated scanning first, manual review of flagged assets second, and a revised image sourcing policy that mandates Creative Commons or internally produced photography for all new uploads from a set date forward.

State agencies sitting inside the Shared Services procurement umbrella have more options, including access to whole-of-government licensing agreements negotiated centrally. Whether those agreements cover retroactive use — meaning images already published — is a legal question several agencies are now seeking advice on from the State Solicitor's Office.

The next hard deadline is October 2026, when several Metronet-linked community engagement sites are scheduled to go live, including pages covering the Morley-Ellenbrook Line corridor. Digital managers on those projects have been told, according to project documentation available under freedom of information, that all image assets must pass a licensing clearance check before publication. That requirement, if enforced consistently, would set a practical precedent for how the broader WA public sector handles the problem going forward.