Adelaide's duplicate image problem: how the City of Churches stacks up against the global pack

Adelaide's major cultural institutions are quietly wrestling with a problem that has bedevilled galleries, libraries and government agencies across four continents: duplicate digital images clogging databases, inflating storage costs and undermining the integrity of public records. The scale here is more manageable than in London or Los Angeles, but local archivists say the city's rapid expansion into tech and defence industries is making the issue harder to ignore.

The timing matters. South Australia's push to position Lot Fourteen — the former Royal Adelaide Hospital site on North Terrace — as a hub for space, defence and data-driven industries has brought a wave of new digital infrastructure investment to the city. With that investment comes enormous volumes of image data: satellite imagery, engineering schematics, heritage documentation and promotional photography, much of it ingested from multiple sources without deduplication protocols in place.

What's happening in Adelaide's institutions

The State Library of South Australia, based on North Terrace, holds more than five million digitised items. Heritage documentation projects linked to the Olympic Dam uranium expansion and the AUKUS submarine program at Osborne have added tens of thousands of new image files to state and federal repositories since 2023. Archivists at institutions including the History Trust of South Australia, headquartered on Kintore Avenue, have flagged that incoming image batches from construction and engineering contractors routinely contain duplication rates of between 15 and 40 percent — a figure consistent with benchmarks published by the Digital Preservation Coalition, a UK-based industry body, in its 2024 annual briefing.

That duplication rate matters in dollar terms. Cloud storage for uncompressed image archives runs at roughly $28 to $45 per terabyte per month on Australian enterprise contracts, according to publicly available AWS and Azure pricing schedules current as of June 2026. A mid-sized cultural institution holding 20 terabytes of duplicated image data could be wasting upward of $10,000 a year on storage alone — before factoring in staff time spent manually reconciling records.

Adelaide's situation compares reasonably well with peer cities. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum digitisation program, which completed its public-facing phase in 2023, reported that early bulk ingestion from partner institutions left its internal DAM — digital asset management — system carrying a duplication load it took 18 months to clear. The City of Cape Town's heritage directorate published findings in late 2024 showing that its municipal image archive had a duplication rate exceeding 50 percent, largely because different city departments had uploaded the same photographic surveys independently. By contrast, Wellington, New Zealand's Archives New Zealand agency introduced mandatory hash-based deduplication checks at the point of ingest in early 2024, cutting its duplication rate to under 8 percent within 12 months.

What Adelaide is — and isn't — doing about it

South Australia's Department for Environment and Water adopted a new Digital Asset Framework in March 2025 that includes deduplication requirements for any image collection exceeding 500 gigabytes. The framework applies to Crown agencies but not to statutory authorities or universities, a gap that archivists at institutions including the University of Adelaide's Barr Smith Library on Victoria Drive have raised in submissions to the State Records Council.

Lot Fourteen's resident organisations, including the Australian Space Agency and SmartSat CRC, operate under separate Commonwealth data governance rules that do not yet mandate deduplication audits. The Australian Institute for Machine Learning, also based at Lot Fourteen, has been developing automated image-matching tools that could be applied to heritage cataloguing — but no formal partnership with SA state agencies has been announced.

For smaller organisations — community galleries in Norwood, regional councils in the Hills and Fleurieu — the practical advice from the Digital Preservation Coalition is straightforward: before ingesting any new batch of images, run a free perceptual hashing tool such as digiKam or ExifTool to flag duplicates. It costs nothing except time, and can cut storage bills immediately. Adelaide, on this count, is ahead of Cape Town and roughly level with Glasgow, which introduced similar guidance to its council cultural venues in 2025. It is still behind Wellington. Closing that gap, archivists here say, is mostly a question of political priority — not money or technical capability.