Wollongong's digital image problem: How the city stacks up against global peers tackling duplicate visual data

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contains thousands of images accumulated over more than a decade of web publishing, tourism campaigns and planning documentation — and a significant portion of those files are duplicates. The council confirmed in its 2025–26 operational plan that a digital records audit was underway, part of a broader move to consolidate content management systems ahead of a planned website redevelopment scheduled for completion by mid-2027.

The issue sounds mundane. It is not. Duplicate images inflate storage costs, slow internal search tools, create version-control headaches for planning and communications staff, and — critically — expose councils to copyright and licensing risk when the same asset is logged under multiple entries with different attribution records. For a mid-sized regional authority managing everything from Crown land documentation to Crown Street Mall event photography, that risk is real.

Why Wollongong sits at an inflection point

The timing matters. Illawarra's institutional digital footprint has expanded sharply over the past three years. The University of Wollongong's Innovation Campus at North Wollongong has grown its research output and with it its public-facing image archive. BlueScope Steel, operating out of Port Kembla, has added substantial visual documentation to its green steel transition communications — technical renders, site photography and stakeholder presentation decks that circulate across multiple platforms simultaneously. When the same image enters different workflows without a centralised deduplication check, it multiplies.

Globally, cities of comparable size and industrial character have been dealing with this longer. Geelong, Victoria — population roughly 280,000 against Wollongong's approximately 220,000 — completed a digital asset management overhaul through the City of Greater Geelong in 2024, consolidating image libraries across seven internal departments into a single DAM platform. Newcastle, NSW, another useful comparison given its steel history and coastal geography, moved its council image library onto a cloud-based system with automated hash-matching deduplication in 2023. Internationally, Bilbao in Spain — a former heavy-industry city that reoriented around culture and tourism, much as Wollongong aspires to — embedded AI-assisted duplicate detection into its municipal archive as part of a 2022 European Union-funded smart-city grant.

Wollongong has no equivalent program publicly announced yet, though the council's operational plan reference to the digital audit suggests the groundwork is being laid.

The local institutions doing the heavy lifting

Two local organisations are ahead of the curve. Wollongong City Libraries, which operates branches including the central library on Burelli Street and the Thirroul branch, shifted to a cataloguing system in 2024 that flags identical image metadata on upload — a low-cost intervention that staff describe in internal documentation as reducing duplicate image entries by a significant margin during the first six months of operation. The figure cited in council committee papers from November 2025 was a reduction of more than 30 percent in flagged duplicate entries across the libraries' local history photographic collection.

The Illawarra Performing Arts Centre on Burelli Street has similarly tightened its image submission policy for event promoters since January 2026, requiring unique file identifiers on all supplied photography to prevent the same press shot appearing under multiple event listings in the venue's content system.

These are patch solutions rather than a city-wide architecture. Geelong's 2024 consolidation cost approximately $340,000 according to publicly available council budget documents — a figure that gives some sense of the investment required for a proper fix at regional scale. Newcastle spent less by working within an existing Microsoft 365 environment, using SharePoint's built-in similarity detection tools rather than a bespoke platform.

For Wollongong, the most practical near-term path is likely the Newcastle model: leverage existing infrastructure, apply deduplication tools already available within the council's software licences, and phase a full DAM rollout into the 2027 website redevelopment budget. The alternative — doing nothing while storage costs rise and licensing audits become more aggressive — is the more expensive option. Councils in South Australia paid settlement costs in 2023 and 2024 related to image licensing disputes that originated precisely in poorly managed duplicate archives, according to reporting by the Local Government Association of South Australia.

The digital records audit currently underway at Wollongong City Council is expected to produce findings by the end of the 2026 calendar year. What happens with those findings — whether they translate into a funded program or sit in a drawer — will determine whether Wollongong catches up to its peers or keeps falling behind.