How Wollongong's Planning Records Ended Up Riddled With Duplicate Images — and What Council Is Doing About It

Wollongong City Council's digital records system contains thousands of duplicate images spread across planning and infrastructure files, a problem that accumulated quietly over more than a decade and is now the subject of a remediation effort that began in earnest in early 2026.

The issue is not trivial bureaucracy. Development applications lodged through the NSW Planning Portal reference council's internal image library for site photographs, heritage documentation and infrastructure assessments. When the same image appears under multiple file references — sometimes attached to entirely different properties — the integrity of the underlying record comes into question. For a city managing significant rezoning activity around Port Kembla and the Illawarra Renewable Energy Zone, clean documentation is operationally critical.

How the Problem Built Up Over Time

The roots of the duplication problem stretch back to at least 2012, when Wollongong City Council migrated from an older content management system to its current enterprise document platform. At the time, the migration was conducted without a deduplication protocol, meaning files that existed in multiple folders across different directorates — planning, engineering, heritage — were imported in their entirety rather than consolidated.

Over subsequent years, staff across council's City Development and Infrastructure Services departments continued to upload site photographs and aerial images without cross-checking the existing library. The practice was not a policy failure in isolation; it reflected a broader pattern seen in local government technology transitions across NSW during the 2010s, when cloud storage became cheap enough that storage limits stopped acting as a natural check on duplication.

The Crown Street administrative building and the Burelli Street planning offices both maintained separate image repositories for years. Field officers photographing sites in suburbs like Figtree, Fairy Meadow and Corrimal would upload directly to whichever folder their department used, with no automated matching against existing files. By the time the problem was formally identified during a 2024 internal audit of the planning portal, conservative estimates placed the number of duplicate image records in the tens of thousands.

BlueScope Steel's ongoing industrial transition has intensified the pressure on council records management. Applications related to the Port Kembla steelworks precinct and the adjacent renewable energy infrastructure corridor — stretching from Kemblawarra Peninsula toward Windang — have generated a particularly dense volume of site documentation. Errors in that documentation carry real-world consequences: a rezoning or heritage exemption tied to the wrong site photograph can delay approvals by weeks.

What Remediation Actually Looks Like

Council engaged a Wollongong-based digital records consultancy in February 2026 to conduct a structured deduplication project across the planning and infrastructure asset libraries. The work involves running hash-matching algorithms against the full image corpus, flagging identical or near-identical files, and then manually reviewing contested cases where images are similar but not identical — a distinction that matters for heritage assessments covering the Illawarra escarpment villages of Bulli and Thirroul.

The University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility has provided technical advice to the project, drawing on research conducted under its urban data governance program. The facility, located on Northfields Avenue in Keiraville, has been working with local government clients on records integrity questions since 2021.

The remediation project is running in three phases through to December 2026. The first phase, covering development application files lodged between 2012 and 2018, was completed in May. Phase two, covering 2019 to 2023 files, is currently underway. The third phase will address files lodged in 2024 and 2025, the period with the highest volume of Port Kembla corridor applications.

For residents and developers, the practical implication is straightforward: any development application currently on exhibition that references site photographs lodged before 2019 may be subject to image verification delays of up to ten business days while council confirms record integrity. Applicants lodging new DAs through the NSW Planning Portal are advised to attach their own high-resolution site photographs rather than relying on council's library imagery, at least until phase three is complete. Council's City Development team at the Crown Street offices can advise on specific applications on request.