Bendigo's public image archive tackles duplicate photo problem after years of catalogue confusion

A coordinated effort to clean up duplicate and degraded images across Bendigo's key public institutions wrapped up its initial phase this week, with the Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Hargreaves Street confirming the audit had flagged more than 4,200 files across partner collections for review, replacement or permanent deletion.

The push matters now because several of those collections are feeding directly into active public projects. Bendigo Health's redevelopment documentation — part of its $630 million capital expansion — relies on accurate photographic records of heritage buildings and site surveys. Mislabelled or duplicated images lodged within shared databases have, on at least two occasions this year, sent contractors to incorrect reference files, according to project coordination notices reviewed by The Daily Bendigo.

What triggered the audit

The problem had been building for years. When the City of Greater Bendigo began digitising records in earnest around 2019, images from multiple scanning rounds were merged into a single repository without consistent naming protocols. The result: the same photograph sometimes existed under three or four different file identifiers, while other images had been cropped, compressed or watermarked differently in each iteration, making automated deduplication tools unreliable.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus library, which shares archival resources with the city through a memorandum of understanding signed in 2021, identified the issue formally in late 2025 after a student research project on the Dja Dja Wurrung cultural landscape turned up seven near-identical aerial photographs of the Loddon River corridor, each tagged with different metadata. Staff at La Trobe flagged the discrepancy to the Archives Centre, which prompted the broader audit.

The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street also participates in the shared repository for its historical collection documentation. Gallery staff confirmed this week that 318 image records in their section of the catalogue had been marked for replacement with master-resolution scans, a process expected to take until late August. No works were mislabelled in the public-facing collection, but internal provenance files were affected.

What the replacement process involves

Duplicate image replacement is more painstaking than it sounds. Each flagged file requires a human reviewer to confirm the master version, check that metadata — including dates, location tags and rights information — is accurate, and then push the corrected file to every downstream system that references it. The Archives Centre is using a locally hosted instance of ResourceSpace, an open-source digital asset management platform, to track the workflow.

For records connected to Aboriginal cultural heritage — including photographs of Dja Dja Wurrung sites under protection through the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 — the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation has been consulted at each replacement step to verify that sensitive images are correctly restricted and not inadvertently made publicly accessible through the deduplication process. That protocol added several weeks to the timeline but was considered non-negotiable by all parties involved.

The cost of the audit and replacement project has been shared across three bodies. The City of Greater Bendigo allocated $48,000 from its 2025–26 records management budget, La Trobe contributed staff time equivalent to approximately $12,000 in labour, and a small grant from Regional Arts Victoria covered digitisation work tied to the cultural heritage components.

For residents or researchers who use the public-access terminals at the Bendigo Library on Hargreaves Street, the practical effect will be noticeable from mid-July onward: image loading speeds should improve as redundant files are cleared, and search results for historical photograph requests will return fewer confusing near-duplicates. The Archives Centre advises anyone who downloaded or saved catalogue images before June 30 to check the repository again after July 14, when the first batch of corrected master files goes live, to ensure they are working from the most current and accurately labelled version.