How Wollongong's Council Website Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What It's Doing About It

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contains thousands of duplicate images — some files uploaded four or five times over — and the organisation is now partway through a structured audit and replacement program it quietly launched in the first quarter of 2026. The problem did not emerge overnight. It is the product of at least a decade of decentralised content management, staff turnover, and platform migrations that left no single team fully in charge of what gets published where.

The timing matters. Council is mid-stream on a broader digital transformation project tied to its 2025–2030 Community Strategic Plan, which commits to improving the accessibility and performance of council.wollongong.nsw.gov.au. Residents using the site to track development applications in Gwynneville, check foreshore event permits near Flagstaff Hill, or search heritage listings in Bulli have increasingly reported slow load times — a symptom, IT staff have acknowledged internally, of bloated media libraries.

How the Problem Built Up Over Time

The root cause is structural. When Wollongong City Council migrated its website to a new content management system in 2017, bulk imports of legacy image files were conducted without deduplication checks. Staff in separate directorates — planning, parks and recreation, economic development — each maintained their own folders and frequently uploaded the same promotional photos of places like Win Entertainment Centre or North Beach rather than linking to a shared asset. Every refresh of a page template triggered fresh uploads.

Three subsequent partial redesigns between 2019 and 2024 compounded the issue. Each redesign inherited the bloat from the previous build. By late 2025, the media library held an estimated 40,000-plus files, with internal assessments suggesting that somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of those were duplicates or near-duplicates — the same Crown Street Mall activation photograph cropped to three different aspect ratios, for instance, sitting in three separate folders under different file names.

The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences flagged the broader issue of unmanaged public-sector digital assets in a 2024 research paper examining NSW local government ICT practices, noting that media library sprawl consistently ranks among the top three contributors to degraded website performance for councils with populations above 100,000. Wollongong's population sat at approximately 220,000 at the 2021 Census.

What the Replacement Program Actually Involves

The duplicate image replacement program is not simply a deletion exercise. Council's digital team, working out of the Burelli Street civic administration building, is running a three-stage process: automated scanning to flag likely duplicates, manual review by communications staff to confirm which version is the canonical file, and then a redirect or replacement pass to ensure no live page is left pointing to a deleted asset. Broken image links on high-traffic pages — particularly those relating to the Port Kembla industrial precinct and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation's regional projects — are being prioritised first.

The program also intersects with an accessibility compliance push. Under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, images on government sites must carry meaningful alternative text. Many of the duplicated files in council's library were uploaded without any alt-text at all, meaning the cleanup provides a chance to retrofit that metadata. Council has set an internal target of achieving full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance on its top 200 most-visited pages by December 2026.

For residents and local businesses, the practical consequence of a cleaner image library should be faster page loads and more reliable search results within the council site. For organisations like the Wollongong Business Chamber on Crown Street, which regularly links to council planning pages when advising members on development applications, fewer broken links will reduce time spent chasing current information.

The audit is expected to conclude by September 2026, with a public-facing summary of the outcomes to be included in council's quarterly digital performance report. Residents who notice broken or mismatched images on council pages in the meantime can report them through the council website's feedback function or by calling the general inquiry line on 4227 7111.