How Wollongong's councils and institutions landed in a copyright minefield — and what they're doing about it

Wollongong City Council is not alone. Across the Illawarra, from the University of Wollongong's Crown Street offices to the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation's regional planning portals, public bodies and local businesses are quietly working through what digital archivists call a duplicate-image problem — a backlog of visual content that was copied, reused, or syndicated without proper licensing, and has now accumulated across years of web publishing.

The audit work accelerated this year. A combination of tightening copyright enforcement by stock-image agencies, new Australian Government guidance on public sector digital asset management, and growing awareness among web administrators has pushed the issue from nuisance to formal project status at several Illawarra institutions.

How it got this way

The roots run back to roughly 2008–2014, when council communications teams, regional development bodies, and university marketing departments were building out their first serious web presences on constrained budgets. Stock photography licences were expensive. Creative Commons was imperfectly understood. Staff regularly pulled images from Google searches, copied them from each other's sites, or reused a single purchased image across dozens of pages without checking whether the licence allowed it.

BlueScope Steel's community engagement pages, Port Kembla Harbour Corporation's public-facing materials, and Wollongong's CBD business improvement district promotions all expanded rapidly during this period. The result was a distributed archive of images where the same photograph — a shot of the Nan Tien Temple on Berkeley Road, say, or a standard aerial of the Port Kembla steelworks — might appear in fifteen separate places, some licensed, some not, and some where the original source was simply unknown.

The University of Wollongong's digital communications unit acknowledged the scale of the problem in its 2025 internal web governance review, which flagged duplicate and unlicensed images as a priority remediation item ahead of the university's broader website consolidation project. The university operates more than 200 active web presences across its faculties, research centres, and student-facing portals.

The audit and replacement push

Wollongong City Council's digital team began a structured image audit in late 2025, working through the council's main site at wollongong.nsw.gov.au as well as legacy microsites tied to programs including the Wollongong 2022–2032 Community Strategic Plan. The process involves both automated tools that flag visually identical image files and manual review of licensing metadata.

Regional development bodies have faced a similar reckoning. The Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund, which has backed infrastructure and economic projects across the region, publishes project documentation and promotional material that frequently incorporates photography sourced informally over the years. Replacing those images requires either purchasing retrospective licences — which can run from $50 to several hundred dollars per image depending on usage type — or commissioning original local photography.

That second option is increasingly the preferred approach. Several Crown Street digital agencies have reported a noticeable uptick in commissions from institutional clients seeking locally shot, fully licensed replacement photography since late 2025. The work is granular and unglamorous: an image of Flagstaff Hill, a correctly licensed photograph of WIN Stadium on Harbour Street, a fresh shot of the Wollongong Central shopping precinct rather than a decade-old stock image of a generic Australian mall.

The practical lesson emerging from the Illawarra experience is consistent: organisations that built their digital presence fast and cheaply in the early web era are now paying a slower and more expensive price to clean it up. The smarter approach going forward involves licensing images at the point of publication, maintaining a searchable internal asset register, and training communications staff to treat image sourcing with the same rigour applied to written content. Wollongong City Council's revised digital content guidelines, circulated internally in March 2026, include exactly those requirements. Other regional bodies are expected to adopt similar frameworks before the end of the 2026–27 financial year.