Wollongong Council Moves to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing City's Digital Property Records

Wollongong City Council confirmed this week it is working to purge hundreds of duplicate images from its publicly accessible DA tracking system after an internal audit found the problem had been compounding since at least January 2025. The duplicates — in some cases the same site photograph appearing up to eleven times against a single application — have slowed load times on the ePlanning portal and, council officers say, caused confusion during community consultation periods for several Crown Street corridor developments.

The timing matters. Council is under sustained pressure to accelerate housing approvals across the Illawarra, with the NSW Government's Housing and Productivity Contribution applying across the region since late 2024. Every bottleneck in the DA pipeline draws scrutiny from both developers and community groups watching the city's housing supply numbers. A clogged digital record system, however unglamorous the problem sounds, has real consequences when planners, objectors and applicants are all trying to pull the same documents simultaneously.

Where the Problem Showed Up First

The issue was first flagged by staff at the council's Development Services counter on Burelli Street in late June, when applicants for two separate infill projects in Fairy Meadow reported downloading what appeared to be identical photograph sets that did not match their sites. A cross-check against the Objective ECM document management system — the platform council migrated to in mid-2023 — revealed the duplication was widespread, touching 312 individual DA files as of the audit completed on 1 July.

The University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue has been informally consulted, according to council's digital services team, about potential automated deduplication tools already in use for large-scale infrastructure datasets. No formal contract has been signed. Council's own IT unit is leading the remediation, with a target of clearing the backlog from the most active files — particularly those tied to the North Wollongong waterfront precinct and the Dapto release area — by 31 August 2026.

Separately, Port Kembla-based community advocacy group Illawarra Community Housing, which regularly lodges submissions on affordable housing DAs, said its volunteers had noticed the image problem as far back as March but assumed it was a browser issue on their end. The group submitted two formal DAs through the portal in the past six months covering sites on Princes Highway in Unanderra, and both had duplicated attachment records.

What the Data Shows

Council processes roughly 1,800 development applications per year across the Wollongong local government area. The 312 affected files represent about 17 percent of active applications lodged since the Objective ECM migration. Processing times for affected DAs averaged 4.2 days longer than unaffected files over the March-to-June quarter, according to figures provided by council's planning directorate — a gap that compounds quickly across a high-volume period. The state government's benchmark under the NSW Planning Portal Performance Framework requires 80 percent of standard DAs to be determined within 40 days; Wollongong sat at 74 percent for the June quarter.

The duplication appears to stem from a misconfigured automated sync between the council's legacy Pathway system and the newer Objective platform during bulk data transfers. No ratepayer data or private applicant information was exposed. The issue is confined to image metadata, not the applications themselves.

Residents and applicants who believe their DA file may be affected can contact council's Development Services team directly at the Burelli Street office or through the NSW Planning Portal dashboard, where council has added a notification flag to the 312 identified files this week. A corrected upload process is being tested now. Council expects to publish a short technical explainer on its website by 11 July, and the topic is listed for discussion at the next Ordinary Council Meeting on 28 July, where the planning committee will receive a formal remediation report.