How Bendigo's Public Image Archive Got So Cluttered, and What's Being Done About It

Bendigo's public-facing institutions are sitting on a digital photography problem that has been building quietly for the better part of a decade. Duplicate images, sometimes dozens of identical or near-identical shots catalogued under different file names, different rights statuses and different departments, now clog the asset libraries of organisations from the City of Greater Bendigo council to Bendigo Health and the Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street. Getting to grips with how that happened is the first step to fixing it.

The timing matters. Bendigo Health is mid-way through a significant capital expansion, with new infrastructure projects generating fresh rounds of commissioned photography for tender documents, community consultations and media releases. La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, anchoring the Edward Street education precinct, is simultaneously refreshing its regional marketing materials. Both organisations need clean, rights-cleared image libraries, not inherited tangles of unattributed stock.

A Problem Born in the Rush to Go Digital

The root cause is not carelessness so much as circumstance. Regional councils and institutions across Victoria began digitising their photographic archives in earnest around 2010 to 2015, often without the budget to implement proper digital asset management systems. Files were saved by individual staff members onto shared drives organised by year, then by event, then, as those systems proved unwieldy, by nothing coherent at all. When staff moved on, their folder logic moved with them.

Bendigo's arts sector felt this acutely. The Ulumbarra Theatre on Gaol Road, which opened in 2015 inside the restored Sandhurst Gaol, generated several separate photographic commissions across its first few seasons. Those shoots were managed by different contractors and filed by different staff members, meaning the same performance images were often catalogued three or four times across different council directories. The Bendigo Regional Arts Centre on View Street faced similar problems when it updated its programming database around 2019.

Compounding the issue was the widespread use of image-sharing arrangements between regional organisations. A photograph taken at the Bendigo Easter Festival, for instance, might be passed from the council's tourism unit to a regional development authority to a state government promotional body, each saving their own copy with their own metadata, or none at all. By the time image-rights questions began attracting serious legal attention across the Australian arts sector in the early 2020s, many organisations discovered they could not reliably trace who had taken a given photograph, when, or under what licence.

Why the Fix Is Harder Than It Looks

Deduplication, the technical process of identifying and removing redundant files, sounds straightforward. In practice it is not. Automated tools can match pixel-identical files, but regional libraries are full of images that are not quite identical: cropped differently, exported at different resolutions, or run through different colour-correction processes for different print and web uses. A tool that flags only exact duplicates will miss perhaps 60 to 70 per cent of the problem, according to industry guidance published by the Australian Society of Archivists.

Manual review is the alternative, but it is expensive. A collection audit for a mid-size regional organisation with 10,000 to 20,000 image assets, a plausible size for an institution like Bendigo Health's communications unit, can run to several weeks of a professional archivist's time at current Victoria market rates of roughly $80 to $120 per hour. Few regional bodies have budgeted for that work in the current financial year, which began on July 1, 2026.

Several Bendigo organisations are nonetheless moving. The City of Greater Bendigo has flagged a review of its digital asset management arrangements as part of a broader records-management project running through the second half of 2026. La Trobe University's Bendigo campus communications team is understood to be piloting a cloud-based digital asset management platform that includes automated similarity-detection, though the rollout timeline has not been made public.

For smaller community organisations, the historical societies along Pall Mall, the neighbourhood houses in Kangaroo Flat and Strathdale, the practical advice from archivists is straightforward: start with a file-naming protocol before worrying about deduplication software. A consistent date-based naming convention, applied from now forward, prevents the problem from getting worse while longer-term solutions are worked out. That is a low-cost first step that any organisation can implement without a capital budget.