Bendigo Council's Digital Archive Overhaul Tackles Duplicate Image Problem Head-On

The City of Greater Bendigo confirmed this week that it has begun rolling out automated deduplication software across its municipal digital image archive — a collection that spans more than 40,000 photographs, heritage scans and planning documents held at the Bendigo Town Hall records division on Hargreaves Street. The move follows an internal audit completed in late June that found a significant portion of the archive contained duplicate or near-duplicate files consuming storage and slowing access for staff across multiple departments.

The timing is not accidental. Bendigo Health's ongoing capital expansion at Lucan Street has generated a surge in planning and heritage documentation over the past 18 months, as contractors and council officers exchange site imagery, architectural drawings and environmental assessments. That volume of digital traffic accelerated a pre-existing problem: files uploaded from different sources were landing in the same database without any cross-referencing check, creating redundant copies that made keyword searches unreliable and occasionally surfaced outdated images alongside current ones.

What the Audit Found — and What It's Costing

The June internal audit, which reviewed records dating back to the archive's digital transition in 2014, identified that roughly one in five image files in the planning and heritage streams was a functional duplicate — either an identical file or a re-scanned version of the same original document. Council officers would not confirm a precise cost figure associated with the redundancy before publication, but storage licensing for municipal digital archives of this scale typically runs into tens of thousands of dollars annually, and duplicates directly inflate that bill by demanding unnecessary server capacity.

The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Pall Mall, which manages historical photographic collections including images from the goldfields era, operates a separate but linked repository. Staff there flagged the duplicate issue to council's information technology team as far back as March 2025, noting that some heritage photographs were appearing in both the council's own system and the shared regional database with conflicting metadata — different dates, different captions — creating authenticity concerns for researchers and Aboriginal cultural heritage practitioners who rely on the collections for land and heritage assessments.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus on Edwards Road has a direct stake in the outcome. The university's humanities and regional studies programs use the shared archive for undergraduate and postgraduate research, and academic staff had raised concerns internally about citing images whose provenance was muddied by duplicate entries carrying inconsistent descriptive data.

The Fix, and What Researchers Should Expect

The new software, which council's digital services team began deploying on Monday, uses perceptual hashing — a technique that detects visually similar images even when file names or metadata differ — to flag potential duplicates for human review before any deletion occurs. No files are removed automatically. A two-person review panel drawn from council's records management unit will assess flagged items, with Aboriginal cultural heritage files routed through an additional consultation step given their sensitivity under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006.

The full deduplication pass across the 40,000-plus file collection is expected to take until late August, council's digital services team indicated in a project update circulated internally this week. From September, the archive will move to a new upload protocol requiring staff to run a duplicate check before adding any image batch — a procedural change designed to prevent the backlog from rebuilding.

For researchers, heritage consultants and community members who access the archive through the council's online portal, access will remain uninterrupted during the process. However, anyone who has bookmarked direct links to specific images should re-verify those links in September, when the cleaned database goes live with revised file identifiers. The Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Pall Mall is the first point of contact for queries about heritage image access during the transition period.