Tasmania Spends Thousands Removing Duplicate Photos From Government Archives

Tasmania's state government is partway through a remediation project to purge thousands of duplicate images from its official digital asset libraries, a problem that built quietly over more than a decade of fragmented IT management and is now consuming significant administrative resources across multiple Hobart-based agencies.

The issue matters now because the Liberal government's push to modernise its public-facing digital infrastructure, including revamped tourism portals and updated planning databases linked to major projects like the Marinus Link undersea cable, has forced agencies to actually audit what they hold. When they did, the scale of the duplication problem became impossible to ignore.

How the Problem Accumulated

The root cause is straightforward: Tasmania never had a whole-of-government digital asset management standard. Through the 2010s, individual departments, Tourism Tasmania on Liverpool Street in Hobart, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, Parks and Wildlife Service, each built their own photo repositories using different software platforms and different file-naming conventions. When agencies were restructured or merged, their image libraries were often dumped wholesale into new systems rather than properly integrated. A photograph of Wineglass Bay taken in 2014 might exist in four separate folders across three departments, each with a slightly different filename and metadata tag.

The State Archives Office of Tasmania, based on Murray Street in the CBD, has been aware of the structural gaps since at least 2019, when an internal review flagged inconsistent metadata standards as a risk to long-term digital preservation. That review did not trigger a funded remediation program at the time. The problem compounded through the COVID-19 period, when staff were rapidly digitising physical records and uploading them with minimal quality control.

Tourism Tasmania is the agency most visibly affected. Its digital library underpins both the official DiscoverTasmania.com platform and content supplied to national travel publishers. Industry insiders have long noted that searching the internal library for images of the Freycinet Peninsula or the Salamanca Market often returns the same shot filed under multiple campaign names, "Winter Festival 2021," "Autumn Drive Campaign," "Evergreen Assets", each treated as a distinct file by the system.

The Cost of Cleaning Up

Duplicate image remediation is not cheap. Across Australian state governments that have undertaken similar projects in recent years, the work typically involves a combination of automated deduplication software and manual curatorial review, the latter necessary because automated tools can incorrectly flag near-identical but legitimately distinct images as duplicates. The manual review component alone can run to hundreds of hours of staff time for a library of any significant size.

Tasmania's government has not publicly released a cost figure for its current remediation work. What is on the public record is that the Department of Customer Services and Digital Strategy received a budget allocation in the 2025-26 state budget to progress digital asset governance reforms, though the specific line items within that allocation were not itemised in budget papers tabled in Parliament.

The broader context is a state that has been spending heavily on digital infrastructure. The Tasmanian Government's Digital Strategy 2023-2027 committed to consolidating government platforms and improving data interoperability, goals that are directly undermined by fragmented, duplicate-riddled image archives that slow down search functions and create version-control confusion for communications staff.

Parks and Wildlife Service, which manages image rights for locations including Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park and South Bruny Island, faces a particular complication: some duplicate images carry different licensing metadata, meaning one copy of a file may be correctly marked as rights-managed while another version of the same image sits in the system unlabelled. That creates legal exposure if unlicensed versions are published.

For Tasmanians watching their government's digital modernisation promises, the practical upshot is that the cleanup needs to finish before new centralised platforms can work as advertised. Agencies have been advised to freeze the creation of new standalone image repositories pending new whole-of-government guidelines, expected to be published by the Department of Customer Services and Digital Strategy before the end of 2026. Until those standards are in place and the backlog cleared, the same photograph of the Wellington Range at sunset will keep turning up in four places at once.