How Wollongong's Council Website Ended Up Full of Broken Images — and What It Will Take to Fix It

Wollongong City Council's public-facing website is carrying an estimated 4,200 duplicate or broken image files across its planning, infrastructure and community service pages — a problem that traces directly back to a 2019 content management system migration that nobody fully completed. Council's digital services team confirmed the figure in an internal audit tabled at the June ordinary meeting, and staff are now working through a staged replacement program they expect to run until at least March 2027.

The timing matters. Council is mid-way through updating its Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund submissions and refreshing the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone project pages, both of which rely on accurate visual documentation to satisfy state government reporting obligations. Broken thumbnails on planning portal entries have already drawn complaints from Crown Lands and the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, which flags incomplete image records as a deficiency during compliance reviews.

How the Problem Built Up Over Seven Years

The roots go back to 2018, when Council moved from an ageing Squiz Matrix installation to a new Drupal-based platform. The transfer was handled in two tranches — public-facing content first, then internal document libraries — but the second tranche was deprioritised after the 2020 pandemic response absorbed most of the ICT team's capacity. Files migrated across as orphaned assets: present in the database, detached from the pages that originally called them, and gradually duplicated each time an officer re-uploaded an image that already existed somewhere in the system without knowing it.

By 2023, the Wollongong Local Government Area's digital asset library held roughly 38,000 image files. The audit found 11 percent of those were exact duplicates and a further 4 percent were low-resolution placeholders that had been superseded but never deleted. Crown Street Mall precinct redevelopment pages were among the worst affected, with 17 separate project updates pointing to image paths that no longer resolved. The Fairy Meadow Community Hub page, relaunched in late 2024 after the hub's $2.1 million renovation, was missing its before-and-after construction gallery for nearly six months before a resident complaint prompted a manual fix.

The audit was commissioned in February 2026 after the University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility flagged the issue while cross-referencing council planning documents for a regional resilience study. The facility, based on Northfields Avenue, uses council's public data feeds as a baseline for several ongoing infrastructure projects. Researchers found image metadata timestamped from as far back as 2014 sitting alongside files uploaded last year — a sign the de-duplication had never been systematically run.

The Replacement Program Now Underway

Council's ICT unit has contracted local firm Kembla Digital Solutions — based in the Wollongong Innovation Campus on Squires Way, Fairy Meadow — to run the replacement work under a $186,000 engagement signed in May. The scope covers automated hash-matching to identify true duplicates, manual review of roughly 900 files the algorithm cannot confidently categorise, and a new naming convention that ties each asset to its parent page's unique reference number.

The work is being staged by directorate. Environment and Planning pages go first, given the compliance pressure, with the goal of clearing that section by September 30. City Services and the Major Projects portfolio — which includes Port Kembla Gateway documents and the BlueScope Steel green transition environmental assessments — follow in the second stage, due December. Everything else, including the community events archive and the Crown Street Mall redevelopment gallery, completes in the March 2027 final stage.

Residents who use council's DA tracking portal or the development.wollongong.nsw.gov.au public register and notice a broken image on a current application should use the feedback button on the relevant page — council says it has staffed a dedicated triage inbox for the duration of the project, with a 48-hour response commitment. For older historical pages, the advice is to request records directly through council's Right to Information team at the Wollongong City administrative offices on Burelli Street, where original documents are held regardless of what appears online.