How Wollongong's council website ended up riddled with duplicate images — and what it cost to fix

Wollongong City Council's public website was, by early 2025, carrying thousands of duplicate images across its service pages — the same photograph of Crown Street Mall appearing in nine separate sections, the same aerial shot of Port Kembla Harbour recycled across planning, tourism and infrastructure pages without any systematic record of where each instance lived. The council's digital team confirmed the problem during an internal content audit that began in October 2024.

The timing matters. NSW local councils have faced mounting pressure since the state government's 2023 Digital Infrastructure for Local Government framework set expectations around accessible, non-duplicated web content. For Wollongong — a city with a complex industrial identity, a university precinct anchored by the University of Wollongong's Innovation Campus on Squires Way, and an active waterfront redevelopment at Flagstaff Hill — the website is not a brochure. It is a primary interface for planning applications, community consultations and BlueScope Steel's green transition communications, all of which depend on accurate, retrievable visual content.

How the backlog built up

The root cause, according to a council document tabled at the February 2026 ordinary meeting, was straightforward: no centralised digital asset management system had been in place between 2017 and 2023. Staff across different directorates — planning, environment, community services — each uploaded images independently to the council's content management system. There was no deduplication process, no consistent file-naming convention, and no audit trail connecting an image to the page it was meant to illustrate. By the time the 2024 audit ran, the council's media library contained more than 14,000 image files, of which the audit identified approximately 3,800 as confirmed or probable duplicates.

That six-year gap also coincided with significant churn in council communications staff and two separate website platform migrations. Each migration imported the existing library wholesale rather than cleaning it first. The result was a compounding problem: each refresh of the site embedded the duplicates more deeply into page templates and auto-generated thumbnail queues.

The Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation, which coordinates digital services across several member councils including Wollongong, Shellharbour and Kiama, flagged duplicate asset management as a shared regional concern in its 2024-25 operational plan. The issue is not unique to Crown Street offices.

The fix, and what comes next

Council contracted a Sydney-based digital asset management firm in March 2025 to run the remediation project, budgeted at $187,000 over eighteen months. The work involved three stages: automated hash-matching to identify pixel-identical files, manual review of near-duplicates where cropping or compression differed, and a controlled deletion and redirect process to ensure no live page pointed to a removed file.

As of the council's June 2026 progress report, approximately 2,900 of the flagged duplicates had been resolved. Remaining cases — around 900 images — involve contested usage, where the same photograph appears in contexts that may require separate licencing clearances, particularly images sourced during the 2019-2022 Port Kembla Harbour master plan consultation process.

For residents and businesses navigating council services online, the practical effect has been incremental: page load times on the planning portal dropped measurably after the first deletion tranche in August 2025, and the council's accessibility compliance score under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines improved because duplicate alt-text strings were also cleaned during the process.

The broader lesson for Wollongong — and for councils across the Illawarra Shoalhaven — is procedural rather than technical. A digital asset register, mandatory file-naming protocols and quarterly library audits were all recommendations the council's own IT governance committee had floated as far back as 2019. None were actioned until the accumulated weight of seven years of unmanaged uploads finally made the cost of inaction more visible than the cost of the fix. The council's digital strategy, due for renewal in late 2026, is expected to embed those protocols as standing operational requirements rather than optional best-practice guidance.