Adelaide Tackles the Duplicate Image Problem Quietly — While Other Cities Spend Big to Get It Wrong

Adelaide's public sector technology teams are running a lean, largely unglamorous operation to strip duplicate images from government digital archives — and the approach, built around a small cluster of civic-tech partnerships at the Lot Fourteen precinct on North Terrace, is producing results that bigger-budget programs in comparable cities have so far struggled to match.

The issue matters more than it might sound. Government and institutional archives bloated with duplicate scanned images slow retrieval systems, inflate cloud storage costs, and — in the case of health and planning records — create genuine risks when staff retrieve the wrong version of a document. South Australian digital records administrators have described the problem as one of the most persistent and underappreciated costs in public-sector IT, though none were willing to be quoted on the record given ongoing procurement sensitivities.

What Adelaide Is Actually Doing

The practical work is concentrated in two places. At Lot Fourteen, Space Industry Hub tenants working on satellite imaging data-processing have adapted image-deduplication pipelines originally designed for remote sensing archives. Those same tools are now being trialled by the State Records Authority of South Australia, which maintains physical and digital holdings under the State Records Act 1997. Separately, the City of Adelaide — whose digital asset register covers everything from planning application photographs to heritage building scans — began a structured deduplication audit of its document management system in the second half of 2025, targeting an estimated backlog of several years of untagged uploads.

Neither program is enormous in scale. But both reflect an emphasis on using existing procurement relationships and local technical capacity rather than importing enterprise software from overseas vendors at significant licence cost. That distinguishes Adelaide from the experience of, say, the City of Amsterdam, which in 2023 publicly acknowledged that a major digital archive contract had produced a system unable to reliably flag near-duplicate images — only pixel-identical files — leaving a substantial portion of the problem unresolved after considerable expenditure. Auckland Council has faced similar criticism following a 2024 review of its Auckland Council Property database, which found duplicate imagery had compounded errors in rates assessment records.

How the Global Picture Compares

Singapore's Integrated Land Information Service — known as INLIS — is frequently cited as a benchmark. The Singapore Land Authority has invested heavily in automated deduplication since at least 2021, using perceptual hashing algorithms that catch visually similar images even when file metadata differs. The results have been widely referenced in public-sector IT circles, though independent audits of INLIS performance figures have not been published.

Adelaide's situation is instructive precisely because it is not Singapore. The City of Adelaide covers roughly 15 square kilometres, the State Government's digital holdings are substantial but not enormous, and the annual technology budget for agencies like the Department for Infrastructure and Transport is constrained. Working within those limits, the Lot Fourteen-adjacent teams have leaned on open-source deduplication libraries — including tools originally developed for astronomy image archives — rather than proprietary platforms. The trade-off is that implementation requires more internal technical skill; the benefit is that recurring licence costs do not compound.

In practical terms, the City of Adelaide's audit, which was still ongoing as of late June 2026, is understood to have reviewed holdings within its Technology One content management environment. Technology One is a Brisbane-based software company with a significant presence across South Australian local government. Whether the audit will produce a formal public report with costings has not been confirmed by the council.

For other South Australian councils watching from the suburbs — Burnside, Mitcham, Prospect — the coming months will offer a clearer picture of whether Adelaide's low-cost approach is genuinely transferable or whether it depends on Lot Fourteen proximity and specific in-house skills that are harder to replicate in smaller administrations. The State Records Authority has indicated it plans to publish updated guidance on digital image management standards before the end of the 2026 calendar year, which would give councils something concrete to benchmark against rather than relying on case studies from cities operating at a different scale entirely.