Ballarat City Council's digital asset management system contains thousands of photographs taken over more than a decade, and a significant portion of them are duplicates. The problem did not emerge overnight. It is the product of overlapping mandates, siloed storage systems and a decade-long failure to establish a single authoritative image library across the city's major public institutions.
The issue surfaced formally in late 2025, when Council's communications team began an audit of assets held across three separate platforms — a legacy SharePoint drive, a newer cloud-based digital asset manager introduced in 2022, and a shared folder structure maintained independently by Visit Ballarat, the city's tourism arm based on Sturt Street. Staff found the same hero images of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens and Sovereign Hill's main street appearing in dozens of slightly different file sizes, names and colour grades, making it impossible to know which version was current, licensed or approved for external use.
How the Duplication Built Up Over Years
The roots of the problem go back to at least 2014, when Ballarat underwent a significant rebranding exercise. New photography was commissioned, but the old library was never formally retired. Files were simply copied across as staff moved between roles or departments, each migration adding another layer of near-identical images with different metadata. The Sovereign Hill Museums Association, which operates the open-air museum on Bradshaw Street, maintained its own photographic archive separately from Council's system throughout this period, and periodically supplied images to regional tourism campaigns without a formal handover protocol.
By 2019, Visit Victoria had integrated Ballarat assets into its state-wide destination content system, pulling images directly from both Council and Sovereign Hill feeds. That integration created a third point of duplication. When the Ballarat Regional Arts organisation — based at the Mining Exchange on Lydiard Street North — began contributing images from events like the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, those files entered the same ecosystem without consistent tagging standards. A photograph of the Town Hall's neo-classical façade might exist in six versions across four different organisations, each labelled differently and carrying different licensing terms.
The practical consequences are real. Communications officers have spent billable hours tracking down rights information for images that appear free to use but are actually restricted. At least one regional campaign publication, according to Council's own 2025 audit summary, went to print with an image that carried a watermark clause the layout team had not noticed — a file that had passed through three separate systems before landing in the final design. The audit did not name the publication or the image supplier.
What a Fix Actually Looks Like
Council resolved in March 2026 to consolidate its holdings into a single Digital Asset Management platform, with a full migration target of December 2026. The project is budgeted at $180,000, which covers software licensing, migration services and staff training. Visit Ballarat and Ballarat Regional Arts are both expected to contribute assets under a unified metadata schema that mandates photographer credit, licensing tier, capture date and approved use cases for every file.
Duplicate detection software — the same category of tool used by major news archives — will flag near-identical images using perceptual hashing, a technique that identifies visual similarity even when file names and sizes differ. Images flagged as duplicates will not be automatically deleted; instead, a two-person review panel will determine which version is authoritative before the others are archived to cold storage rather than permanently removed. That distinction matters for historical records, particularly images tied to Ballarat's gold heritage identity and the collections documented through the Foto Biennale.
The December 2026 deadline is tight. Staff involved in the project say the metadata backfill work alone — applying consistent tags to tens of thousands of existing files — is the most labour-intensive phase. Organisations wanting to contribute assets to a shared public image library in the future should begin auditing their own holdings now, establishing clear ownership records and ensuring licensing agreements with photographers cover multi-organisation use. The cost of not doing so, as Ballarat's experience shows, compounds quietly for years before it becomes impossible to ignore.
