How Bendigo Is Tackling Duplicate Digital Images — And What Other Cities Get Wrong

Bendigo's City of Greater Bendigo council is mid-way through a structured audit of its municipal digital asset library, targeting thousands of duplicate and near-duplicate images that have accumulated across departmental servers since the early 2000s. The audit, which began in February 2026, covers assets held across planning, tourism, and community services portfolios — including images tied to heritage listings along Pall Mall and the Bendigo Art Gallery's public-facing digital catalogue.

The timing is not accidental. Councils across Victoria received updated guidance from the Public Record Office Victoria in late 2025, urging local governments to bring digital record-keeping in line with revised standards before the end of the 2026-27 financial year. For a city with Bendigo's density of heritage assets — the Golden Dragon Museum on Bridge Street, the Central Deborah Gold Mine, the Bendigo Tramways network — the volume of overlapping photographic records is substantial.

A Growing Problem Bendigo Shares With Cities From Guadalajara to Ghent

Duplicate image replacement sounds like a niche archival headache, but it carries real costs. Storage licensing, metadata confusion, and — critically for heritage bodies — the risk of lower-resolution or incorrectly captioned images displacing authoritative originals, are all live concerns. The International Council on Archives flagged duplicate digital asset proliferation as a priority issue at its 2024 congress in Abu Dhabi, noting that regional and mid-sized cities tend to accumulate duplicates at a faster rate than major metros because their IT governance frameworks are thinner on the ground.

Comparable cities offer instructive contrasts. Ghent, Belgium — population roughly 270,000, close to Bendigo's regional footprint in terms of heritage density — completed a city-wide digital asset deduplication project in 2023 through a partnership between its municipal archive and Ghent University. The project reportedly reduced active image storage by more than 30 percent. Guadalajara, Mexico's second city, took a more centralised approach through its state government's digital culture directorate, which Bendigo's situation structurally cannot mirror given the division of responsibility between council, La Trobe University's regional campus on Edwards Road, and Bendigo Health.

La Trobe's Bendigo campus is relevant here: its library and digital humanities staff have been working informally with the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Spring Gully Road on a framework for shared metadata standards. That kind of cross-institutional cooperation is precisely what Ghent executed formally — and what Guadalajara's top-down model bypassed entirely, leading to gaps in community-held collections that weren't covered by the state directorate's mandate.

What Bendigo's Audit Actually Involves

The council's current process uses perceptual hashing software to flag visually similar images across its content management system, then routes flagged batches to departmental officers for manual review. It is unglamorous, iterative work. The Bendigo Art Gallery, which holds a separately managed digital collection linked to its program schedule at 42 View Street, is not formally part of the council audit but has been running a parallel internal review since March 2026.

The cost dimension matters. Cloud storage is not free, and councils operating under rate-capped budgets feel that pressure acutely. Victorian councils have been subject to a rate cap — set at 2.75 percent for 2025-26 under the Essential Services Commission's determination — which compresses discretionary IT spending. Deduplication projects tend to pay for themselves in reduced storage fees within 18 to 24 months according to archival sector benchmarks, but the upfront staff time is a genuine barrier for smaller teams.

Bendigo's relatively proactive stance puts it ahead of several comparable Australian regional cities. Ballarat, for instance, has not publicly announced a similar structured audit, though both cities face equivalent obligations under the same Public Record Office Victoria guidance.

For residents and local organisations with images deposited in council or heritage collections, the practical advice is straightforward: if you have submitted photographs to any City of Greater Bendigo program — including the community heritage grants administered through the council's arts and culture unit — check that your submissions included complete metadata, including date, location, and rights information. Incomplete records are the primary reason duplicates resist automated resolution and require time-consuming manual intervention. The council's digital records team can be contacted directly through the customer service centre on Lyttleton Terrace.