How Bendigo's Public Image Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicates — and What Council Plans to Do About It

Bendigo's civic image library — tens of thousands of photographs documenting everything from the 1850s goldfields to last summer's Bendigo Easter Festival parade on Pall Mall — contains an estimated 30 to 40 percent duplicate files, according to a City of Greater Bendigo internal records management review completed in March 2026. The review, tabled at the April ordinary council meeting, flagged the duplication problem as a priority remediation task for the 2026–27 financial year.

The timing matters. Greater Bendigo Council is mid-way through a broader digital transformation program begun in 2023, and the image archive sits at the intersection of two competing pressures: a push to digitise and publicly share Aboriginal cultural heritage material held in partnership with Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, and a practical need to cut cloud storage costs that have risen sharply since the council migrated from on-premises servers to a hybrid cloud arrangement in late 2022.

How the Backlog Built Up

The duplication problem did not emerge overnight. Through most of the 2010s, individual council departments — heritage, tourism, Bendigo Art Gallery administration, and the communications team — each maintained separate photo folders with no common naming convention and no central asset management system. Staff routinely downloaded images, renamed them, and re-uploaded them to shared drives, creating chains of near-identical files. A photograph of the Bendigo Town Hall taken for a 2017 council annual report might exist under six different filenames across three departmental folders.

The shift to remote work during the 2020 and 2021 COVID lockdowns accelerated the chaos. With staff accessing systems from home through a VPN, ad-hoc file-saving practices became entrenched. The council's IT services team, based at the Lyttleton Terrace municipal offices, flagged the issue as early as mid-2021 but lacked a dedicated budget line to address it.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which has a working relationship with the council through its digital humanities and data management programs, was approached in late 2024 about a possible collaborative audit. That partnership did not proceed past preliminary discussions, but it prompted the council's records team to commission its own internal review — the document that eventually landed on the April 2026 agenda.

The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Hargreaves Street, which holds physical records dating back to the 1850s, was not directly affected by the digital duplication, but archivists there have flagged a related concern: scanned copies of historical photographs held at the centre have themselves been duplicated across the digital system, sometimes with conflicting metadata about dates and subjects.

The Cost and the Fix

Cloud storage is not cheap at scale. The council's 2025–26 budget allocated approximately $340,000 to digital storage and records management across all departments — a figure that has grown by roughly 18 percent since the hybrid cloud migration began. The internal review estimated that eliminating confirmed duplicate images alone could reduce active storage requirements by up to 12 terabytes, generating meaningful but unquantified annual savings.

The remediation plan approved in principle by council involves three stages. First, automated deduplication software will run across all departmental image folders, flagging files with identical or near-identical pixel data. Second, a small records team will manually review flagged files, particularly any material linked to Aboriginal cultural heritage collections managed in consultation with Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation — a step considered non-negotiable given the sensitivity and cultural ownership protocols attached to that material. Third, a single digital asset management platform will replace the current patchwork of shared drives.

The project is scheduled to begin in September 2026, with the deduplication phase targeted for completion before the end of the 2026–27 financial year. Staff at the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street, whose own image collection feeds into the council system, have been briefed and will be involved in the manual review stage.

For residents and researchers who access council images through the Greater Bendigo website or via the Hargreaves Street archives, the practical effect should eventually be cleaner search results and faster load times. The harder work — establishing the naming conventions and governance rules that prevent duplication from re-accumulating — is the piece the council's records team says will define whether the fix lasts beyond a single financial year.