Adelaide's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Global Peers

Adelaide's public institutions are sitting on tens of thousands of duplicate digital images, and the organisations responsible for managing them are only beginning to reckon with what that costs. From the City of Adelaide's digital infrastructure team to collections staff at the South Australian Museum on North Terrace, the problem is the same: years of uncoordinated scanning drives, migration projects, and inter-agency file sharing have left archives bloated with identical or near-identical files stored under different names, in different folders, on different servers.

The issue has sharpened considerably in 2026. With the Lot Fourteen precinct on North Terrace positioning itself as a hub for data-driven industries — including space tech firms, defence contractors tied to the AUKUS submarine program, and AI startups — the pressure to maintain clean, lean digital infrastructure has jumped. Sloppy asset management is no longer just an administrative inconvenience; it is a credibility problem for a city marketing itself to global tech investment.

What Adelaide Is Actually Doing

The City of Adelaide began an internal digital asset audit in late 2025, contracting Canberra-based records management firm Recordkeeping Innovation to assess duplication rates across its document and image libraries. The audit scope covers files held by council departments since at least 2015. Results from the first phase were expected internally by June 2026, though no public findings have been released at the time of publication.

The South Australian Museum, which holds one of the world's largest natural history collections and has been digitising physical records for over a decade, uses the open-source platform CollectiveAccess to manage its digital catalogue. Staff there have acknowledged publicly in past conference presentations that deduplication remains an ongoing challenge, particularly for photographic records digitised during the 2010s under multiple grant-funded projects that did not share a common file naming convention.

Across the Parklands in the inner southern suburb of Unley, the local council has taken a more manual approach, tasking existing staff with periodic reviews rather than commissioning specialist software. That model is cheaper upfront but slower, and it does not scale — a constraint that larger institutions have largely moved past.

How Adelaide Compares to Amsterdam, Montréal and Nairobi

Globally, the benchmark for municipal duplicate image management has shifted sharply in the past three years. Amsterdam's Stadsarchief, which manages the city's official photographic and documentary record, deployed automated hash-matching software across its 40-terabyte image library in 2023, reducing its duplicate file count by an estimated 18 percent within the first year, according to the archive's own published annual report. Montréal's municipal library network completed a similar deduplication project across 14 branch collections in early 2025, citing storage cost savings as a primary driver.

Nairobi's situation is instructive for different reasons. The Nairobi City County digitisation program, launched in 2022 with support from the African Digital Heritage initiative, built deduplication into its workflow from day one rather than retrofitting it — a decision that archivists in higher-income cities have since cited as the smarter long-term model. Adelaide, like most Australian cities, is retrofitting.

The Australian Library and Information Association has noted in its 2025 sector survey that fewer than 30 percent of Australian councils with populations above 100,000 had a documented deduplication policy for digital image collections as of December 2024. Adelaide sits in the majority that does not yet have a publicly available policy, though the City of Adelaide audit suggests internal work is underway.

For institutions at Lot Fourteen specifically — including the Australian Space Agency headquarters and the Stone & Chalk innovation hub — the stakes are more commercial than archival. Duplicate imagery in product catalogues, marketing libraries, and technical documentation costs money in storage and in staff time spent managing conflicting versions of the same file.

The practical path forward for Adelaide's institutions involves three steps that peer cities have already taken: adopt a common file hashing standard across departments, integrate deduplication checks into ingestion workflows before new images enter the archive, and publish a clear retention and disposal schedule. None of those steps require significant capital. They require policy commitment — which, as of July 2026, remains the missing piece.