Bendigo Leads Regional Australia in Tackling Duplicate Image Problem — But Global Peers Are Moving Faster

Bendigo's major cultural and civic institutions are quietly grappling with one of the more unglamorous problems in the digital age: thousands of duplicate images clogging databases, slowing public access, and inflating storage costs at a time when budgets are under pressure across Victoria's regional centres. The problem is real, measurable, and, according to archivists and digital infrastructure managers in comparable mid-sized cities overseas, entirely solvable — provided the will and the workflow exist.

The issue matters right now because several of Bendigo's anchor institutions are mid-cycle in significant capital and digital programs. Bendigo Health is deep into its redevelopment on Lucan Street, which includes a push to digitise patient-record imaging going back decades. The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Pall Mall holds photographic collections — including goldfields-era survey images — where duplication rates in partially digitised catalogues can run as high as 30 percent, a figure consistent with findings published by the Digital Preservation Coalition in its 2024 benchmarking report covering institutions of similar collection size. Meanwhile, the City of Greater Bendigo's planning portal contains overlapping site photographs submitted across multiple development applications for the same parcels of land in suburbs like Kangaroo Flat and Strathdale.

What Comparable Cities Are Doing

Ghent, in Belgium, offers the most cited comparison point. The city's public library network and municipal archive completed a deduplication project across 1.2 million digitised images in 2023, using open-source perceptual hashing tools — software that compares images by visual fingerprint rather than filename — and cut its active storage footprint by 22 percent within eight months, according to documentation published by Ghent's Digipolis technology agency. Christchurch, New Zealand, post-earthquake, confronted a version of the same problem when heritage documentation images were submitted to multiple agencies simultaneously. The Canterbury Regional Council reported in its 2024 annual digital infrastructure review that a mandatory deduplication step was added to its resource consent imaging workflow, reducing redundant files by roughly one-in-four.

Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, took a different approach — centralising image submission for municipal planning through a single city-run portal in 2022, which structurally prevented duplicates from entering the system rather than cleaning them up after the fact. The contrast with Bendigo, where planning images can arrive via email, USB, and three separate council web forms depending on the application type, is not flattering.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which houses information management and data science programs at its Edwards Road facility, has been developing curriculum around exactly this kind of practical archival challenge. Students on the Bachelor of Information Management program have undertaken practicum placements with local government and arts organisations in the region, though the university has not publicly announced any formal deduplication partnership with the City of Greater Bendigo as of July 2026.

The Local Cost and What Comes Next

Cloud storage is not free. Amazon Web Services S3 standard storage, the tier used by many Victorian councils for document management, costs approximately $0.025 per gigabyte per month as of mid-2026. For an archive holding 40 terabytes of image files — a realistic figure for a regional council with a decade of planning photography — duplicate rates of even 20 percent translate to a recurring cost of several hundred dollars a month for data that delivers no public value. Multiply that across Bendigo Health's clinical imaging archive, the Bendigo Art Gallery's digitisation project on View Street, and the Bendigo Regional Archives, and the aggregate figure becomes harder to ignore.

The City of Greater Bendigo's Digital Strategy, adopted in 2023, identifies data quality as a priority workstream but does not specify deduplication as a named initiative. Residents and researchers who rely on the public-facing Historic Bendigo Photographs database — accessible through the council's website — will notice that some goldfields-era images appear under multiple catalogue entries, a visible symptom of the underlying problem.

The practical path forward, based on what Ghent and Christchurch have demonstrated, involves two parallel steps: deploying automated perceptual hashing at the point of ingest so new duplicates stop entering collections, and scheduling a retrospective clean of existing archives in order of collection size. Neither requires significant capital expenditure. The Bendigo institutions best placed to move first are those already mid-project — and the window to embed good practice before those projects finalise is narrowing.