Geelong Council Spent Thousands Fixing Duplicate Photo Disaster in Archives

The City of Greater Geelong holds tens of thousands of digital images across its planning, heritage and communications systems, and for years, a significant share of those files existed in more than one place at once. The practice of duplicate image storage, where the same photograph was uploaded, renamed and saved across separate departmental folders without a unified asset register, created a backlog that staff are still working through in mid-2026.

The issue matters now because Geelong is in the middle of one of the most document-heavy periods in its recent history. The Geelong City Deal, the federal government's infrastructure investment framework for the region, has generated thousands of project images, planning maps and progress photographs since its signing. Deakin University's Waurn Ponds and Waterfront campuses have each contributed large volumes of research imagery and promotional content to shared government-facing repositories. When duplicates accumulate across systems that multiple agencies access, the administrative cost of identifying, verifying and removing redundant files compounds quickly.

A Problem That Predates the Digital Transition

The roots of the duplication problem stretch back to the early 2010s, when the council and its partner agencies began migrating paper-based heritage records to digital formats. Photography from sites along the Barwon River corridor, the Central Geelong retail precinct and older industrial areas around Norlane and Corio was scanned or re-photographed without a consistent file-naming protocol. Staff in different teams, heritage, urban design, media, saved their own versions locally.

By the time cloud-based asset management became standard practice around 2018 and 2019, the legacy of inconsistent local storage had already seeded thousands of near-identical files into the broader system. A 2023 audit of local government digital asset practices by the Victorian Auditor-General's Office flagged exactly this kind of fragmentation as a recurring problem across multiple councils, noting that without centralised metadata standards, retrieval times and storage costs both rise.

For context on scale: the Australian Local Government Association has reported that mid-sized councils typically hold between 50,000 and 200,000 digital assets across all departments. Even a duplication rate of 15 to 20 percent, which aligns with figures cited in the auditor-general's work, represents a substantial administrative overhead in storage licensing, staff hours and system performance.

What the Fix Actually Looks Like on the Ground

The practical work of duplicate image replacement involves more than deleting a file. When an image has been used in a published planning document, a heritage citation for a property on Ryrie Street or McKillop Street, or embedded in a public-facing web page, removing the duplicate without first confirming which version is canonical can corrupt the record trail. That verification step, checking file metadata, cross-referencing upload dates and confirming which copy carries the correct licensing or attribution, is where the labour cost concentrates.

Deakin University's library and information science programs at the Waurn Ponds campus have produced research on exactly this workflow, and there is ongoing informal collaboration between council archivists and university researchers on best-practice metadata frameworks. The Gordon TAFE has also run short-course training in digital asset management for local government staff, reflecting demand from councils across the Barwon region.

For residents and community organisations that submit images to council processes, heritage nominations, planning applications, community grant acquittals, the practical upshot is straightforward. Any image submitted for an official record should carry a descriptive filename, a date and a note about who holds copyright. Submitting the same image twice under different names, or uploading low-resolution and high-resolution versions without labelling them as variants, feeds the exact duplication cycle that archivists are trying to unwind.

The City of Greater Geelong has not publicly specified a completion date for its current asset review. What is clear is that the combination of City Deal documentation volumes, increased digital heritage work and new state planning requirements for the Surf Coast growth corridor will keep the pressure on. Getting image records right from the point of first submission is the cheapest solution available.