How Bendigo's Public Image Archive Got Into Such a Mess — and What It Will Take to Fix It

The City of Greater Bendigo's digital asset library contains thousands of photographs taken across more than a decade of civic projects — streetscapes along Pall Mall, construction milestones at Bendigo Health's Heathcote Road campus, cultural events at the Capital Theatre on View Street. A significant portion of those images, according to council records, are duplicates, mislabelled, or have been used in place of the correct file so many times that the original context has been lost entirely.

The council began a formal duplicate-image-replacement audit in the first quarter of 2026, targeting digital records held across its communications, planning, and community services departments. The timing was not accidental. Greater Bendigo's digital transformation program — a multi-year overhaul of internal systems that began rolling out in 2024 — surfaced the problem in a way that ad hoc file management had previously obscured.

A Problem That Built Up Slowly, Then All at Once

The root cause is familiar to any organisation that grew its digital presence quickly without building the governance to match. Between 2012 and 2022, the council's communications team expanded the volume of public-facing digital content substantially, producing material for everything from Bendigo Bank's partnership announcements to planning consultations for the Rosalind Park precinct. Images were saved across shared drives, uploaded to a content management system introduced in 2018, and, in many cases, duplicated again when that system was migrated partway through. Staff turnover compounded the issue: file-naming conventions changed at least three times over that period, leaving folders with no consistent taxonomy.

By the time the 2024 digital transformation project began in earnest, the library held an estimated 47,000 image files across active storage — a figure that internal project documents, cited in a council briefing paper tabled in February 2026, described as likely to include a duplication rate of around 30 percent. That would put the number of redundant or incorrectly assigned images somewhere above 14,000 files. Manually reviewing each one against its original brief or publication record is slow work.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which has an established relationship with the council through its community engagement and data programs, was approached earlier this year about whether student project work could assist with the classification phase. No formal agreement had been publicly announced as of this week.

What Replacement Actually Involves

Duplicate-image replacement is not simply deleting copies. When an image has been used in a published document — an approved planning report, an archived council agenda, a media release still indexed on the council's website — removing or substituting it requires a documented replacement decision so the record chain stays intact. The Australian standard for local government records management, AS ISO 15489, requires that any amendment to an official record be traceable and reversible.

That obligation has slowed the project. The council's records team is working through a prioritised list, starting with images embedded in documents lodged with the Victorian Public Record Office since 2019. Community-facing content — the kind that appears on the Bendigo Visitor Centre's promotional material or on signage for the Bendigo Art Gallery precinct on View Street — is being handled separately, with replacements sourced from a cleaned master library being assembled under the new system.

The practical consequence for residents is likely to be invisible if the project goes smoothly. Errors in public-facing materials — a photograph of the wrong street used in a rezoning notice, for example — carry legal exposure for the council, particularly under Victoria's Planning and Environment Act 1987, which sets requirements for accuracy in statutory documents. One incorrectly labelled site photograph in a 2023 heritage overlay consultation was identified in the February briefing paper as the kind of error the audit is specifically designed to prevent from recurring.

The audit is scheduled for completion by December 2026. Residents who identify mismatched images in council documents currently on public exhibition can submit a correction request through the council's official feedback portal, with a 10-business-day response commitment in place for planning-related materials.