How Wollongong's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of the Same Image Twice — and What's Being Done About It

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library currently holds tens of thousands of image files spread across at least three separate content management platforms. A significant portion of those files are duplicates — the same photograph stored under different file names, in different folders, uploaded by different staff members who had no way of knowing someone else had already done the job. The situation is common across Australian local governments, but the Illawarra region's particular history of rushed digitisation has made it a textbook case of how the problem compounds over time.

The timing matters. Councils across New South Wales are being pushed toward full digital-record interoperability under the state government's digital strategy frameworks, and the 2026 federal budget allocated additional funding through the Local Government Grants Commission to support technology upgrades at the council level. For Wollongong — which serves a population spread from Helensburgh in the north to Shellharbour's boundary in the south — cleaning up a bloated image library is not cosmetic housekeeping. It directly affects how efficiently staff can retrieve planning documents, heritage photographs, infrastructure records and community event photography.

How the Pile-Up Happened

The roots of Wollongong's duplicate-image problem trace back to the early 2010s, when council departments began independently scanning physical archives without a coordinating policy. The Local Studies library at the Wollongong City Library on Burelli Street digitised historical photographs of the steelworks at Port Kembla and the old Wollongong Courthouse. Meanwhile, the communications and media team was uploading entirely separate image sets to a CMS. Engineering departments kept their own folders on internal drives. Nobody talked to anybody else, and there was no single taxonomy applied across the organisation.

The problem accelerated during the COVID-19 period, when staff working from home began uploading images to shared cloud drives — Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive and at least one legacy Dropbox account — with no naming convention and no deduplication tool running in the background. By the time any review was attempted, the same photograph of, say, the Flagstaff Hill foreshore or the WIN Stadium precinct might exist in five separate locations with five different file names.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility has consulted with several NSW councils on data management issues, and the academic literature on local government digital hygiene consistently identifies the same root causes: rapid digitisation without governance, staff turnover that breaks institutional memory, and procurement of platforms that don't communicate with each other. None of that is unique to Wollongong, but the city's industrial transition — with BlueScope Steel and the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone generating significant new documentary material — has added pressure to get the archive in order before another wave of records arrives.

What a Fix Actually Looks Like

Deduplication is not simply a matter of deleting files. The standard approach, used by organisations including the State Archives and Records Authority of New South Wales, involves running hash-matching software that identifies files with identical or near-identical pixel data regardless of file name. That process surfaces the duplicates; human review is then required to determine which version is the master record and which can be safely disposed of under the relevant retention schedule.

For a library of the size Wollongong City Council is understood to hold, industry practitioners typically estimate the review process takes between three and six months depending on staff resourcing. Storage costs are a practical motivator: commercial cloud storage for large image libraries can run to thousands of dollars annually, and duplicate files consume that budget for no return. The NSW Government's GovDC data centre program, which many councils use for backup storage, charges on a per-gigabyte basis.

The practical upshot for residents and local organisations is straightforward. The Illawarra Historical Society, which has a long-standing partnership with Wollongong City Library to digitise photographs of Crown Street, the Illawarra Escarpment and the South Coast railway corridor, has a direct interest in the outcome. A rationalised, properly tagged master archive means researchers can actually find what they are looking for. That is the unglamorous goal at the end of a very long paper trail.