How Bendigo Is Handling the Duplicate Image Problem — and How It Stacks Up Against Cities Worldwide

Bendigo's cultural institutions are confronting a growing archival crisis: thousands of duplicate digital images clogging collections management systems, inflating storage costs, and making genuine historical records harder to find. The problem is not unique to central Victoria, but the way Bendigo's organisations are responding is drawing quiet interest from peers in comparable regional cities on three continents.

The issue surfaced prominently during the ongoing capital expansion at Bendigo Health on Lucan Street, where administrative digitisation of decades-old patient record photography and facility documentation produced an estimated 40 per cent redundancy rate in scanned files — meaning roughly four in ten images were functional duplicates of an existing file. That figure aligns with benchmarks reported by archival software firm Preservica in its 2024 sector survey, which found regional health and cultural institutions globally averaged duplicate rates between 30 and 45 per cent during bulk digitisation projects.

The Local Picture: From the Art Gallery to Camp Hill

The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street began a systematic deduplication audit of its digital collection in March 2026, working through approximately 85,000 image files accumulated since a mass scanning push in 2019. Staff are using open-source perceptual hashing tools — software that identifies visually identical or near-identical images regardless of filename — to flag candidates for removal or consolidation. The gallery has not publicly stated how many duplicates it has found so far, but the audit is expected to conclude before the end of the 2026 calendar year.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road has a parallel interest. The university's library services team is managing digitised regional history collections that overlap with material held by the City of Greater Bendigo's own archive unit. Without a shared deduplication protocol, both institutions risk independently storing identical scans of the same nineteenth-century goldfields photographs and municipal maps — a waste of server infrastructure and, eventually, of public money.

The City of Greater Bendigo adopted the Public Record Office Victoria's Digital Recordkeeping Policy framework in 2022, which sets baseline standards for file naming, format, and metadata — but does not mandate automated duplicate detection. That gap is where local practice currently lags.

What Other Cities Are Doing

Comparable mid-sized cities with strong regional cultural identities have moved faster. Ballarat, 75 kilometres south-west of Bendigo, embedded automated deduplication into its Art Gallery of Ballarat's collections platform in late 2024, reducing active image storage by roughly 18 per cent within six months, according to the gallery's 2024–25 annual report. In New Zealand, the Dunedin City Council — often cited as a regional governance benchmark — mandated cross-agency deduplication audits for all digitised heritage holdings from July 2025, under its Digital Heritage Strategy.

In the Netherlands, the regional archive network Regionaal Archief Rivierenland has run automated deduplication since 2021 and reports it avoided an estimated €90,000 in storage infrastructure costs over three years. The scale is different from Bendigo, but the principle — that duplicate image management is a fiscal issue as much as an archival one — translates directly.

Bendigo's relatively fragmented approach, with each institution managing its own audit on its own timeline, means it has not yet captured those savings. Cloud storage pricing in Australia from major providers sits at roughly $0.023 per gigabyte per month for standard archive tiers as of mid-2026, which sounds trivial until an institution is holding 20 terabytes of images, a third of which are duplicates.

The City of Greater Bendigo's libraries and culture directorate is understood to be scoping a shared collections infrastructure project, though no formal announcement has been made and no timeline is publicly confirmed. For the Bendigo Art Gallery, the View Street archive team, and the La Trobe campus library, the practical next step is the same: finish the audit, agree on a shared metadata standard with neighbouring institutions, and build automated deduplication into intake workflows before the next bulk scanning project begins. The alternative — another round of mass digitisation producing another 40 per cent redundancy rate — is a cost that mid-sized regional cities internationally have already decided they cannot afford.