Years of rapid digitisation, staff turnover and siloed systems left councils, agencies and community organisations sitting on thousands of redundant image files — and the reckoning has finally arrived.
Townsville City Council's digital asset library contains more than 340,000 image files. A significant portion of those, according to a review process that began in the second half of 2025, are duplicates — the same photograph stored under different file names, in different folders, sometimes across entirely different server environments. The council is not alone. Across North Queensland, the problem has quietly compounded for more than a decade.
The timing matters because 2026 is the year several Townsville institutions committed to migrating legacy content management systems ahead of a broader Queensland Government whole-of-government cloud transition. When you move a bloated, unaudited library into a new environment, you pay for every redundant megabyte — in storage costs, in migration labour, and in the staff hours burned searching for the right version of an image that exists in six near-identical copies.
The duplication problem did not happen overnight. It accelerated through three distinct phases that local digital records managers have since been able to map with reasonable clarity.
The first phase ran roughly from 2008 to 2014, when Townsville organisations began digitising print archives at pace. The NQ Cowboys, the Townsville Bulletin, Townsville City Council and James Cook University's Townsville campus all ran parallel digitisation projects with little coordination and no shared metadata standards. Images were scanned, saved, renamed and saved again. The same flood photograph from the 2003 Bohle River event, for instance, ended up catalogued under at least four different event descriptors across institutional libraries.
The second phase came with smartphones. From around 2015, community organisations — including Pacific Island cultural groups operating out of halls in Aitkenvale and Garbutt, and First Nations groups involved in early treaty consultation events — began generating high volumes of event photography. These images were emailed, shared via Dropbox, uploaded to Facebook and then downloaded and re-uploaded. Each transfer created a new file. No one deleted the originals.
The third phase was COVID. Between March 2020 and mid-2022, remote working arrangements meant staff across organisations like Townsville Hospital and Health Service and the North Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation were saving working files to personal drives, shared drives and cloud folders simultaneously. When those workers returned to centralised systems, their files came with them — duplicated across every environment they had touched.
The financial picture is sobering. Cloud storage is cheap per gigabyte in isolation, but enterprise-grade digital asset management platforms — the kind that support metadata tagging, rights management and version control — are typically licensed on a per-asset or per-user basis. Organisations carrying 300,000 files when they need 80,000 are paying for overhead that serves no operational purpose.
The Townsville City Council's library and archival services team, based at the Civic Theatre precinct on Boundary Street, flagged the issue formally in a 2025 internal review. The review, details of which are not publicly available, was referenced in a council agenda item published in November 2025 as part of broader digital infrastructure planning. Similar audits are understood to be underway at JCU's Douglas campus and within the North Queensland Cowboys Community Foundation, which manages a substantial photographic archive of outreach programs stretching back to 2009.
Nationally, the scale of the problem is well-documented. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated in its 2023 data integration report that Australian public sector agencies collectively hold hundreds of petabytes of redundant unstructured data, with image files representing a disproportionate share of that waste. The cost of storing, securing and migrating that data runs into hundreds of millions of dollars annually across all tiers of government.
For Townsville organisations now confronting their own version of this problem, the path forward involves three practical steps: an automated deduplication scan using tools such as Adobe Bridge or purpose-built DAM platforms; a governance decision on which version of a duplicated asset is the canonical file; and a retention schedule that prevents the cycle from repeating. The council's IT procurement team is expected to take a digital asset management proposal to committee before the end of the 2026 financial year. Other institutions watching that process will have a template to follow — or, depending on the outcome, a cautionary tale.
About this article
Published by The Daily Townsville
Spread the word
Newsletter