How Wollongong's councils ended up paying twice for the same digital images — and what led here

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contains thousands of photographs, many of them purchased more than once. The duplication — which spans stock imagery used in planning documents, community consultation materials and infrastructure reports — is not the result of a single bad decision. It is the end product of at least a decade of patchy record-keeping, incompatible content management systems and the kind of institutional forgetting that happens when departments are siloed and staff turn over quickly.

The issue surfaced publicly this week as the council's internal audit committee reviewed expenditure on licensed digital content, a line item that had ballooned without clear explanation. The timing is notable. Wollongong, like most of the Illawarra region, is under pressure to demonstrate fiscal discipline at the same moment it is trying to position itself as a serious partner for state and federal investment — from the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone to BlueScope Steel's green transition and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund.

How the problem compounded over time

The roots go back to roughly 2014, when Wollongong City Council migrated its records to a new content management platform. Staff uploaded images that already existed in the old system, but without a deduplication protocol the duplicates were simply absorbed. A second platform migration, around 2019, repeated the pattern. By then, some images had three or four separate licence records attached to them — each purchased at current market rates, which for standard stock photos typically run between $80 and $400 per image depending on usage rights.

Neighbouring bodies compounded the problem when collaborative projects required shared imagery. The Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation, which coordinates planning functions across Wollongong, Shellharbour, Kiama and Shoalhaven councils, ran into jurisdictional ambiguity around who held the master licence for images used in cross-council publications. Each council often simply bought its own copy rather than checking a central register — partly because no central register existed, and partly because the approval process for inter-agency resource sharing added enough friction to make independent purchasing the path of least resistance.

The University of Wollongong, which has collaborated with the council on several Crown Street Mall revitalisation documents and the Gwynneville to city active transport corridor study, encountered similar internal issues as late as 2023 when a review of its marketing and communications stock found roughly 1,400 images held in two separate repositories with no cross-reference between them.

What the audit found — and what it means now

The council's audit committee review, examining procurement records from the 2022–23 and 2023–24 financial years, identified a conservative estimate of duplicate image expenditure running into the tens of thousands of dollars across those two years alone. The figure does not account for earlier years where paper-based records make digital asset tracking unreliable.

State government pressure is not helping the timeline. The NSW Government's digital records framework, updated in 2023 under the State Records Act 1998, requires public bodies to maintain auditable asset registers — but the framework does not prescribe how image libraries must be organised, leaving individual councils to build their own systems. Wollongong's IT department has been in contact with Shellharbour City Council, which completed a basic deduplication audit of its own image library in late 2025 using open-source file-hashing tools at negligible cost.

The practical way forward is not complicated, though it requires political commitment to something unglamorous. A consolidated digital asset register shared across the joint organisation would prevent fresh duplication on any new collaborative project. For existing libraries, file-hashing software — the same category of tool Shellharbour used — can identify pixel-identical images automatically, collapsing what is a labour-intensive manual task into a matter of hours. Council staff briefed on the committee's findings have flagged a proposed policy update for the September 2026 ordinary meeting. Until that policy is adopted, procurement staff on projects connected to the Port Kembla foreshore development and the North Wollongong waterfront master plan have been asked to cross-check the existing image catalogue before raising a new purchase order.