How Tasmania's Public Image Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicates, and What's Being Done About It

Tasmania's state government is working through a systematic audit of its public-facing digital image libraries after an internal review identified widespread duplication across agency websites, tourism portals and heritage collections, a problem that has compounded quietly since the early 2000s and is now costing departments measurable storage and licensing fees each year.

The issue matters now because several high-profile digital overhauls are converging at once. Service Tasmania is rebuilding its citizen-facing web presence from the ground up, while Tourism Tasmania is restructuring the image assets underpinning its brand campaigns ahead of a planned summer push. Both projects have collided with the same underlying problem: nobody systematically deduped the libraries when files were migrated between content management systems over the past two decades.

How the Duplication Built Up

The origins trace to the mid-2000s, when individual agencies managed their own digital assets with little coordination from the Department of Premier and Cabinet. Each time a government website was relaunched, and there have been at least four major statewide portal rebuilds since 2005, image files were copied rather than migrated cleanly. Stock photographs of Salamanca Market, the Wellington Park ridgeline and the Mona ferry crossing on the Derwent appear in some agency libraries dozens of times under different filenames, different metadata tags and sometimes different licensing attributions.

The Heritage Council of Tasmania and the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office at 91 Murray Street in Hobart each maintain separate digitised photographic collections that overlap significantly with material held by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania. Cross-referencing those three collections alone has already identified redundant files running into the tens of thousands, according to the scope of work published with the 2025-26 state budget IT procurement schedule.

Tourism Tasmania's image bank, housed on its dedicated media portal and used by journalists and travel operators globally, has historically been the most visible casualty. Photographers contracted to shoot locations including Wineglass Bay in the Freycinet National Park and the Gordon Dam in the southwest wilderness area found their work appearing under multiple asset IDs, sometimes with contradictory rights metadata, creating potential licensing exposure for agencies that republished the files without checking provenance.

The Remediation Task

The practical work of fixing duplicate image problems involves more than deleting files. A canonical version of each image must be identified, metadata must be standardised to a common schema, and downstream links across government websites must be updated so that removing a duplicate does not break a published page. That last step, link remediation, is where previous cleanup attempts stalled. A 2019 effort by the then-Department of State Growth addressed roughly 4,000 images before the project was deprioritised when staff were redeployed to COVID-related communications work in early 2020.

The current audit, which began in the second quarter of 2026, is using automated perceptual hashing tools to flag visually identical or near-identical images before human reviewers make final decisions. The approach is standard practice in large media organisations and has been adopted by several Australian state governments, including New South Wales, over the past three years. For Tasmania, with a smaller but highly fragmented asset base spread across agencies serving a population of roughly 571,000 people, the per-image remediation cost can be proportionally higher than in larger jurisdictions.

Agencies posting to public-facing sites have been advised to hold off on uploading new image batches to shared repositories until the audit reaches their area of the directory tree, a precaution designed to prevent fresh duplication from undermining work already done.

For Tasmanians who use government websites, the immediate practical effect should eventually be faster page load times and more consistent image quality, particularly on mobile connections in regional areas including the Huon Valley and the northwest coast where network speeds can be constrained. Longer term, a clean, well-tagged asset library reduces the risk of the state inadvertently republishing images under lapsed licences, a reputational and legal risk that the audit documentation flags as the primary driver for finally addressing a problem that has been noted in internal IT reviews since at least 2014.