Sydney's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Amsterdam and Toronto

Sydney's major public institutions are sitting on digital asset libraries riddled with duplicate and misattributed images — a mundane-sounding problem that has cost some comparable cities hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing disputes and forced expensive database overhauls. The City of Sydney Council, the State Library of NSW on Macquarie Street, and several Western Sydney councils are all at varying stages of tackling the issue, according to digital asset management professionals working in the sector.

The timing matters. The NSW government's push to digitise heritage collections and public records has accelerated since 2023, when the State Archives and Records Authority of NSW set new benchmarks for metadata compliance. More images are entering public-facing repositories than at any point in recent history, and duplicates multiply fast when multiple departments scan the same item independently or pull stock photography from different licensed vendors without cross-checking.

What London and Amsterdam Got Wrong — and What Sydney Can Learn

Transport for London discovered in 2022 that roughly 12 percent of images in its public communications archive were duplicates or near-duplicates, some carrying conflicting copyright attributions. The cleanup required an 18-month contract with a specialist vendor and contributed to a broader IT procurement review. Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which digitised more than 700,000 objects for its online collection, faced a parallel problem: multiple high-resolution scans of the same artwork sitting in separate departmental servers, each tagged differently, creating confusion for researchers and licensing staff alike.

Toronto took a more proactive approach. The Toronto Public Library adopted a centralised digital asset management platform in late 2023, requiring all branches to upload images through a single intake system that flags duplicates automatically before they enter the permanent repository. Librarians there credit the system with cutting redundant storage costs, though exact figures have not been publicly released by the institution.

Sydney's situation is patchier. The State Library of NSW has been migrating collections to an updated catalogue system, a project that has involved staff across its Mitchell and Dixson collections in the CBD. Parramatta City Council, which manages significant photographic archives documenting Western Sydney's post-war growth, launched an internal audit of its digital holdings in early 2026. Neither institution has publicly disclosed the scale of any duplicate problem, but professionals in the digital preservation field describe Sydney's overall compliance with metadata deduplication standards as inconsistent across the public sector.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Duplicate images are not just a storage headache. When an institution publishes an image online without realising it carries a different licence to an identical copy already cleared for use, it creates legal exposure. The Australian Copyright Council notes that institutions can face claims under the Copyright Act 1968 even when duplication is accidental. A single unresolved claim involving a commercial photograph can run to several thousand dollars in settlements, based on fee schedules published by collecting societies.

The broader digitisation push adds urgency. The NSW government's Digital Information Security Policy, updated in March 2025, does not specifically address image deduplication but sets requirements around data integrity and asset provenance that effectively bring the issue into scope for any agency handling large media files. Institutions that fail to meet those standards during audits risk being flagged during departmental reviews.

Community archives in suburbs like Marrickville and Penrith — often run by volunteer historical societies with limited IT support — are the most exposed. Many maintain image collections on donated hardware, with no automated flagging tools and no budget to acquire them.

For institutions looking to act now, the practical steps are straightforward: conduct a hash-based duplicate scan using open-source tools such as DupeGuru before any new images enter a public database; establish a single intake point rather than allowing departmental uploads; and cross-reference vendor licences against existing holdings quarterly. Sydney's larger institutions have the resources to do this. The smaller suburban archives almost certainly need either state government support or a shared-services arrangement to make it workable.