Wollongong Council Moves to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Planning Portal

Wollongong City Council's digital services team has been working through a backlog of duplicated images embedded in the city's online development application portal, a problem that has frustrated residents and planning consultants for months. The issue — where the same photograph appears multiple times against a single DA listing, sometimes dozens of times — has slowed page load times and in some cases obscured newer site photos with outdated ones, according to planning professionals who regularly use the system.

The timing matters. The council has been pushing hard to streamline its planning pipeline, particularly as housing supply pressures intensify across suburbs from Fairy Meadow to Warrawong. A cluttered, unreliable document portal makes it harder for neighbours to assess applications, harder for heritage advocates to track changes near listed sites, and harder for developers to confirm their own submissions are complete.

What Went Wrong — and What's Being Fixed

The duplicate image problem is understood to stem from a migration carried out in late 2024, when council moved DA records onto an updated document management platform. During that transition, automated upload scripts pulled attachments from the old system without adequately checking for existing copies, meaning some files — particularly site photographs submitted as part of Statement of Environmental Effects documents — were ingested multiple times. For a busy DA like a proposed medium-density development on Crown Street in the CBD, that could mean a single folder ballooning from a manageable set of files to well over a hundred entries, most of them identical.

The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences has had student project teams working with local councils on data integrity problems as part of its industry-linked curriculum, and the kind of deduplication logic required to resolve this portal issue is squarely within that scope — though it is not confirmed whether any formal engagement is currently in place with Wollongong City Council on this particular fix.

For residents trying to track applications near Port Kembla — where planning activity has surged alongside the renewable energy zone precinct work — a functioning, searchable portal is more than a convenience. Several community groups monitoring BlueScope Steel's industrial transition and adjacent land-use changes have cited the portal as their first stop for checking what is proposed near Springhill Road and the northern buffer zones.

What Residents Should Know Now

Anyone who submitted images as part of a DA in the first half of 2025 is advised to log back into the council's ePlanning portal and check that their application folder reflects what was actually submitted. If duplicate entries are present, council's planning counter at the Burelli Street civic building can flag the record for manual review. Council officers can also confirm which image is the active version of record, which matters for appeals before the Land and Environment Court.

The practical stakes are not trivial. A property owner appealing a refusal at Thirroul or Bulli who cannot show a clean evidentiary record in the portal could face procedural complications, even if the underlying facts of their case are sound. Heritage listings along the Lawrence Hargrave Drive corridor, where the National Trust of Australia (NSW) has documented a number of interwar bungalows, make accurate photographic records particularly important for any proposed alterations.

Australia's property sector has been grappling with digital record integrity more broadly. The NSW government's own digital planning reforms, which have progressively shifted DA processing onto the state's Planning Portal since 2021, have not been without teething problems — a pattern documented in successive Audit Office of NSW reports.

Council has not set a public deadline for completing the deduplication work, but planning staff have indicated the bulk of affected records pre-date March 2025. Anyone with a live application lodged since April of this year is unlikely to be affected. For older applications, the Burelli Street counter is open Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 4.30pm.