How Bendigo Is Tackling Duplicate Image Replacement — and Where It Stands Against Cities Doing the Same

Bendigo's major cultural and civic institutions are mid-way through an overhaul of their digital image libraries, replacing thousands of duplicated, low-resolution or incorrectly tagged photographs with verified, high-quality assets — a process that has exposed both the strengths and limits of how a regional city handles its visual public record.

The effort matters now for a specific reason. Across Australia, state and local governments have been under growing pressure since the Australian National Audit Office flagged digital asset management as a systemic risk in public sector recordkeeping. For regional centres, the stakes are higher: unlike capital-city institutions with dedicated digital archivists on staff, places like Bendigo rely on smaller teams to manage collections that have ballooned since mass digitisation programs began in the early 2010s.

Local Institutions Leading the Clean-Up

The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street holds one of the largest regional public art collections in Australia, with more than 6,500 works catalogued. Gallery staff confirmed in published materials that the collection has been subject to ongoing digital remediation, including the removal of duplicate catalogue entries created during a migration to a new collections management system. The City of Greater Bendigo's own online planning and property portal — accessible through the council's Lyttleton Terrace civic precinct — has undergone similar rationalisation, with duplicate property images flagged during an internal audit of the Pozi-based mapping platform the council uses.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road has pursued a parallel process through its library and research data services. The university's broader institutional repository, shared across its campuses, has been working to resolve duplicate digital object identifiers — a technical problem that compounds when researchers upload the same images across multiple project folders. According to La Trobe's publicly available 2025 Annual Report, the university allocated resources to research data governance improvements across all campuses, though the report does not break out specific Bendigo-campus figures.

Bendigo Health, which is part-way through a capital expansion at its Lucan Street campus, has also had to manage duplicate medical imaging records as it integrates older patient data systems into its new infrastructure. The health service has publicly described its electronic medical record transition as a multi-year project, though specific deduplication statistics have not been released publicly.

How Bendigo Compares Globally

Internationally, the benchmark for duplicate image management in mid-sized cities tends to be set by places with strong civic tech investment. Ghent in Belgium, a city of roughly 265,000 people — comparable in population profile to Greater Bendigo — completed a full deduplication audit of its municipal image archive in 2023, reducing its public photography repository by an estimated 34 percent. The City of Turku in Finland, population around 200,000, went further by adopting AI-assisted perceptual hashing tools to automatically flag visually similar images for human review.

Bendigo is not yet at that point. The tools being used locally remain largely manual or semi-automated, reliant on staff time rather than purpose-built deduplication software. That gap is consistent with findings from a 2024 RMIT University report on digital asset maturity in Victorian local government, which found that fewer than 20 percent of regional councils had adopted automated deduplication workflows for public-facing image libraries.

The practical consequence for Bendigo residents is subtle but real. Duplicate images on the council's planning portal can generate confusion during permit searches, and outdated photographs of heritage buildings — several of which line Pall Mall — can create inconsistencies when property owners reference the public record for renovation approvals.

The City of Greater Bendigo is expected to publish an updated digital strategy document later in 2026, which council officers have indicated will address image and asset management. For institutions like the Art Gallery and La Trobe, the work is already underway — the question is whether the pace will bring Bendigo in line with the more automated approaches being adopted in comparable cities before the next major system migration makes the problem worse again.