Cultural institutions and businesses across the region are sitting on bloated digital libraries full of repeated images — and the storage, labour and retrieval costs are adding up fast.
4 min read
Duplicate images are quietly draining resources from Bendigo's cultural and business sectors, with local archivists and digital managers flagging that unmanaged image libraries are costing organisations significant time and money before a single photograph is even used. The problem is not new, but the scale has grown sharply as digitisation programs accelerate across the region.
At the heart of the issue is a simple but expensive truth: when institutions scan, upload and re-upload images without a deduplication protocol in place, storage costs compound, cataloguing hours multiply, and staff waste time retrieving the wrong version of an asset. In a regional centre where technology budgets are already stretched thin, those losses are not abstract.
Industry benchmarks from the digital asset management sector suggest that between 20 and 40 per cent of files in an unmanaged image repository are duplicates or near-duplicates — meaning organisations are routinely paying to store, back up and manage roughly a third of their holdings twice or more. For an institution running 50,000 image files, that translates to as many as 20,000 redundant assets consuming server space and staff time. At average commercial cloud storage rates, which hovered around AUD $0.023 per gigabyte per month in mid-2025 across major providers, even a modest duplicate problem across a library of high-resolution TIFF files can generate hundreds of dollars in unnecessary annual spend — a figure that compounds across multiple backup tiers.
The issue has direct relevance to two of Bendigo's largest institutional digital operations. The Bendigo Regional Archive Centre on Hargreaves Street houses thousands of historical photographs and documents from across central Victoria, many of which have been digitised in multiple rounds over the past decade as scanning technology improved. Meanwhile, the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street — which holds one of the most significant regional collections in Australia — has been expanding its digital catalogue as part of broader public access initiatives. Neither organisation has publicly confirmed specific duplicate rates in its own holdings, but the general pattern identified by digital preservation professionals applies to institutions of their type and scale.
La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, anchored on Edwards Road, runs its own digital asset systems for research outputs and teaching materials. Library digitisation projects at regional campuses often intersect with state-level programs, meaning files can enter a collection from multiple pipelines simultaneously — a textbook condition for duplication. The university's involvement in regional research projects, including those touching on Aboriginal cultural heritage documentation, means that errors in image management carry not just financial but cultural and legal weight.
Replacing or removing duplicate images is not simply a delete-and-move-on exercise. Proper deduplication requires hash-based matching tools that compare files at the pixel or byte level, human review to distinguish true duplicates from intentional variant captures, and updated metadata protocols to prevent recurrence. The labour component alone can run to dozens of hours for a mid-sized archive, and the process typically needs to be repeated annually as new material enters the system.
Software tools designed for the task range from open-source options like digiKam — widely used in archival settings — to enterprise platforms that charge subscription fees in the range of AUD $200 to $2,000 per year depending on library size and feature requirements. For smaller Bendigo-based businesses or community organisations, the open-source route is viable but requires staff training, which itself has a cost in time.
The practical advice from digital asset management professionals is consistent: establish a single point of ingestion for new images, apply a unique identifier at the point of upload, and run a deduplication audit at least once every 12 months. For organisations like Bendigo Health, which is mid-way through a capital expansion and generating large volumes of project documentation and imagery, building those protocols into workflows now — before the archive grows further — is significantly cheaper than cleaning up later.
Regional institutions that have not yet run a formal image audit should consider the 2026–27 financial year as a practical starting point. State-level arts and heritage funding rounds, including programs administered through Creative Victoria, have historically supported digitisation and digital preservation work, making a grant application a realistic path to covering the upfront audit costs.
Spread the word
About this article
Published by The Daily Bendigo
Daily brief
Free, in your inbox before 7am. Weekdays.
