Perth's duplicate image problem: how the city stacks up against Singapore, Amsterdam and Vancouver

Perth's planning and property sector has a clutter problem buried inside its own databases. Duplicate images — multiple copies of the same development site photograph, heritage building scan, or infrastructure assessment picture stored across disconnected systems — are inflating storage costs, slowing approval workflows and, in some cases, feeding conflicting visual records into the same planning decision. The issue has become acute enough that the City of Perth and the Western Australian Planning Commission have both flagged digital asset management as a priority reform area heading into the second half of 2026.

The timing matters. The state is processing a development pipeline swollen by AUKUS-linked construction around Henderson and Stirling Naval Base in Rockingham, Metronet corridor rezoning along the Ellenbrook and Morley–Ellenbrook lines, and a residential building surge in the outer northern corridor stretching from Alkimos to Eglinton. Each project generates hundreds of site images. When those images are lodged through the WAPC's Development Assessment Panels portal, emailed separately to the City of Perth's planning inbox, and then re-uploaded by private certifiers, the same photograph can exist in three or four places simultaneously — with no automated system to reconcile them.

What other cities have built

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority addressed this directly in 2023 when it integrated a deduplication layer into its Integrated Land Information Service, the national one-stop property portal. The URA's model uses hash-based fingerprinting to identify identical or near-identical image files before they are accepted into the system, flagging duplicates at the point of upload rather than during post-processing. Amsterdam's planning authority, Gemeente Amsterdam, took a different route, contracting a centralised digital asset management platform across all 13 of its city districts in late 2024, consolidating roughly 4.2 million planning images into a single searchable repository. Vancouver's development permit office embedded deduplication into its CloudPermit workflow system in 2022, reporting a reduction in storage redundancy that the city cited in its 2023 annual technology report.

Perth has none of those integrated systems yet. The WAPC still operates on a document management framework that pre-dates widespread smartphone photography, meaning high-resolution images lodged today are handled under the same storage logic designed for low-resolution JPEG files from the mid-2000s. The City of Subiaco and the Town of Victoria Park have piloted limited tagging protocols for heritage image archives, but neither has a deduplication mechanism at the submission gateway.

The local cost, and what's being tested

Storage redundancy is not just a technical inconvenience. Facilities management consultants working with Perth local governments estimate that unmanaged image duplication across mid-sized councils can add between $40,000 and $120,000 annually in unnecessary cloud storage and administrative remediation costs — figures that scale sharply with the volume of development activity. In a financial year when Perth's residential building approvals have been running at elevated levels driven by the Metronet-adjacent rezoning and the state government's social housing program, those costs compound quickly.

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has been evaluating a metadata-standardisation framework since early 2026 that would, as a first step, require all images submitted through the DAP online portal to carry consistent file-naming conventions — a prerequisite for any automated deduplication to work. A pilot covering development applications in the Stirling local government area, one of Perth's busiest approval corridors, is expected to run through the September quarter. Separately, the City of Perth's digital services team has been in discussions with counterparts from the City of Melbourne's property intelligence unit about shared procurement options for asset management software, though no contract has been announced.

For planning consultants and architects lodging applications out of offices on St Georges Terrace and Murray Street, the immediate practical advice is straightforward: standardise your own image filing before submission. Use consistent file names, strip extraneous metadata, and avoid re-submitting photographs already attached to earlier correspondence in the same application thread. It will not fix the underlying system, but it reduces the chance your project gets tangled in the administrative backlog that duplicate records generate on the other side of the lodgement portal. The bigger fix — the kind Singapore and Amsterdam have already built — will require funding commitments that, so far, have not appeared in WA's state budget papers.