How Bendigo's public image archive ended up full of duplicates — and what it took to get here

Bendigo City Council's digital communications team flagged the problem in writing as far back as late 2023: hundreds of images duplicated across the corporate website, the Visit Bendigo tourism portal and the Greater Bendigo Open Data platform were creating legal, accessibility and branding headaches that no single team owned. By mid-2026, the cleanup is still incomplete.

The timing matters. The council has spent the past 18 months overhauling its digital infrastructure ahead of the Bendigo Health Goldfields Campus expansion on Lucan Street, a project that has generated an enormous volume of new photography, architectural renders and promotional material. Plugging fresh content into a database already clogged with orphaned and duplicated files has slowed publication workflows and, in at least two documented cases, resulted in the wrong building photographs appearing on council planning pages.

How the backlog built up

The roots of the problem stretch back to the council's 2017 content management system migration, when files were bulk-transferred from a legacy system without deduplication. Three separate departments — economic development, tourism and corporate communications — each maintained their own image libraries with no shared taxonomy. The Bendigo Visitor and Tourism Centre on Pall Mall, the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street and the Capital Theatre precinct all appeared under multiple inconsistent file names, with some images licensed for print use only mistakenly uploaded for web distribution.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which partners with the council on regional promotion through the Innovative Communities program, flagged a related issue in 2024 when co-branded imagery used in a joint health workforce recruitment campaign was found to be stored in four separate locations across two organisations' servers, with differing resolution versions and caption metadata that conflicted with each other.

The sheer scale is significant. A Victorian Auditor-General's Office review of local government digital asset management practices, published in March 2025, found that councils across the state collectively held an estimated 40 per cent redundancy rate in their digital image libraries — meaning roughly two in every five stored image files were either exact duplicates or near-identical variants offering no distinct informational value. Greater Bendigo was among the mid-sized councils examined in the background data for that review, though it was not named individually in the published findings.

What the remediation looks like in practice

Council's digital team began a structured deduplication project in February 2026, using a phased audit that started with the Visit Bendigo subdomain before moving to internal corporate directories. The first phase identified more than 2,200 image files flagged for review. Of those, around 800 were confirmed duplicates, 340 had expired or unclear licensing documentation, and a further 120 contained metadata errors serious enough to cause accessibility failures under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 standard, which applies to Victorian government websites.

The Bendigo Art Gallery's digital collections team on View Street has been involved in the process, particularly around images of Aboriginal cultural heritage objects held in the gallery's collection. Ensuring those images carry correct cultural protocols and are not inadvertently duplicated outside sanctioned contexts has added a layer of sensitivity — and delay — to what might otherwise have been a straightforward technical exercise.

Regional arts funding has played a small but meaningful role. Creative Victoria's Regional Development Fund contributed to a digital archiving project at the gallery in the 2024-25 financial year, part of which covered new metadata standards that are now being adopted as a model for the broader council image library.

For residents and local organisations that submit photography to council platforms — whether for events at the Ulumbarra Theatre on Gaol Road or community initiatives through the Bendigo Sustainability Festival — the practical advice from council's digital team is straightforward: submit images with full caption information, photographer credit, date and a clear statement of the licence terms. Files submitted without that information are now quarantined rather than published immediately, a policy change introduced in April 2026. The full remediation across all council platforms is scheduled for completion by December 2026, though the volume of new Bendigo Health campus imagery entering the system between now and then will test that timeline.