Wollongong Councils and Businesses Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem This Week

Wollongong City Council's development application portal flagged a duplicate image error affecting dozens of planning submissions this week, forcing staff at the Crown Street administration centre to manually audit hundreds of uploaded files. The problem, which surfaced on Monday, has delayed at least some DA processing at a time when the Illawarra region is already under pressure to accelerate housing approvals.

The timing matters. NSW is in the middle of a statewide push to streamline development consent, and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund has earmarked funding for councils to modernise digital infrastructure. A glitch that slows DA processing — even by days — draws scrutiny from applicants who are watching construction costs and interest rates with mounting anxiety. A standard residential DA in Wollongong's inner suburbs currently attracts a lodgement fee starting at around $270, and delays add holding costs that developers pass straight to buyers.

What Went Wrong and Where It Hit Hardest

The core issue, as described in a council service notice posted to the Wollongong City Council website on Tuesday, is that the document management system used for planning submissions began duplicating site-plan images when applicants uploaded files larger than 10MB. The duplication created conflicting document version records, meaning some applications showed two or more identical site photos tagged under different submission dates. Council's IT and planning teams began a joint review on Wednesday morning.

The problem compounded for local real estate agencies using third-party listing platforms tied to the same regional land data feeds. Ray White Wollongong's Crown Street office and several other Keira Street agencies reported that property listing images were pulling through in duplicate on realestate.com.au and Domain feeds, requiring manual correction on a listing-by-listing basis. For a mid-winter market already carrying reduced stock — Domain's June data for the Wollongong local government area showed median days on market sitting at 32, up from 24 in the same period last year — even minor platform errors add friction to an already slow sales cycle.

The University of Wollongong's digital infrastructure team, which manages a separate but adjacent set of mapping and spatial data tools used by urban planning students on the Northfields Avenue campus, confirmed they had also encountered the duplicate image flag in their GIS layers this week. A spokesperson said the issue appeared linked to a broader update pushed to a shared spatial data library on June 30, affecting multiple institutional users across the region.

Remediation Underway, With a Deadline in Sight

Council has set an internal target of completing the audit and restoring normal DA processing by close of business Friday, July 10. Applicants with submissions lodged between June 28 and July 2 — the window most likely affected — are being contacted directly by council's development services team and advised to confirm which version of their documents is current. The council's planning counter at 41 Burelli Street is handling walk-in queries on the issue.

For businesses and residents managing their own online presence, Wollongong-based digital services firm Coastal Web Co, which operates out of the Innovation Campus on Squires Way, published a practical advisory this week recommending that clients audit image metadata and file names before uploading to any council or real estate platform. The firm noted that duplicate image flags are increasingly common as mobile phone image files exceed 10MB by default.

Anyone with a DA lodged in late June should log into the council's e-planning portal and check that each uploaded document shows a single version record. If duplicates appear, council's development services team can be reached directly through the portal messaging function — phone lines have been busy. The Burelli Street counter opens at 8.30am weekdays. The broader review of the regional land data feed that appears to have triggered the issue is expected to be completed by mid-July, according to the council notice.