Duplicate Images on Government and Council Websites Are a Bigger Problem Than Anyone Admitted — Until Now

Perth's local councils and state government agencies are sitting on a growing digital mess: thousands of duplicate images cluttering public websites, inflating storage costs, slowing page load times and — in some cases — breaching accessibility standards that require each image to carry accurate, non-repetitive alt-text descriptions. The issue, long treated as a back-office nuisance, is drawing fresh scrutiny from digital governance specialists and accessibility advocates who say the problem has compounded significantly since the post-2022 surge in agency website migrations.

The timing matters. The WA state government accelerated its whole-of-government digital platform consolidation program through 2024 and 2025, folding dozens of departmental sites into shared content management systems. That migration process, while designed to reduce duplication, appears in several cases to have done the opposite — importing legacy image libraries wholesale, with no systematic deduplication applied before publishing. The result is sprawling asset databases where the same photograph of, say, the Stirling Highway or Elizabeth Quay can appear dozens of times under different file names, each instance treated as a unique record.

What Specialists Are Saying

Digital accessibility consultants working with Perth-based agencies describe the duplicate image problem as a symptom of rushed migration rather than deliberate neglect. The core issue, as practitioners in this space explain it, is that content management systems used across WA public sector sites — including platforms serving the City of Perth and the City of Stirling — do not automatically flag when an uploaded image is functionally identical to one already in the library. Without a deduplication protocol built into the upload workflow, editors simply re-upload assets rather than searching for existing versions.

Accessibility advocates point to a secondary consequence that carries legal weight. Under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, which Australian government bodies are expected to meet at Level AA compliance, duplicate images with inconsistent or missing alt-text create real barriers for users relying on screen readers. An image of the Northbridge Piazza used six times across a single council site, each instance with a different or absent description, produces a confusing and non-compliant experience. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 provides a framework under which failure to meet those standards can attract formal complaints.

The State Records Office of Western Australia, which sets policy for how agencies manage digital assets, has guidance in place requiring agencies to apply consistent metadata standards to image files — including unique identifiers. Whether that guidance is being followed in practice is a separate question, and one that digital auditors say is rarely tested with any rigour at the council level.

Practical Steps Being Recommended

For agencies looking to address the problem, specialists in the field point to three immediate actions: running a hash-based duplicate detection scan across the full image library, establishing a single-source-of-truth asset folder structure before any future migration, and requiring alt-text review as a mandatory step in the content publishing workflow rather than an optional afterthought.

The City of Joondalup and the City of Fremantle are among the Perth metropolitan councils that have in recent years publicly committed to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across their digital properties, making them useful reference points for other councils still working through the implications. Neither council's current compliance status on image asset management could be independently confirmed by deadline.

The broader picture is one of institutional inertia meeting a practical technical problem. Storage costs for duplicate image libraries are not trivial — cloud asset management for a mid-sized government agency can run to tens of thousands of dollars annually, and redundant files contribute directly to that overhead. With the WA state budget currently in surplus, there is funding headroom to invest in proper digital asset management tooling. The question being asked by those watching this space is whether agencies will treat the cleanup as the infrastructure investment it genuinely is, or continue patching around it one migration at a time.