How Wollongong's Council Website Ended Up Drowning in Duplicate Images — and What It Cost to Fix It

Wollongong City Council's corporate communications team spent much of the first half of 2026 doing something unglamorous: hunting down thousands of duplicate images embedded across the council's public-facing web properties and replacing them with a single, properly catalogued asset library. The cleanup, which began in earnest in February, exposed a systemic problem that had been building since at least 2018, when the council migrated its content management system and brought legacy files across without a deduplication audit.

The timing matters. With Wollongong positioned as a regional anchor for the state's emerging green energy economy — Port Kembla's renewable energy zone and the BlueScope Steel transition to green steelmaking are both driving significant institutional investment in the city's public profile — the council's digital presence has become a genuine economic asset. Poor site performance, inflated load times caused by redundant image files, and broken asset links have real consequences when developers, investors and federal agencies are doing due diligence online.

How a Migration Decision in 2018 Planted the Seeds

The root of the problem traces to a content management system changeover eight years ago. When the council shifted platforms, staff migrated existing files wholesale rather than rationalising them. Over subsequent years, individual departments — planning, community services, the Wollongong Art Gallery on Crown Street, and the library network including the Central Library on Burelli Street — each uploaded their own versions of frequently used images: council logos, venue photographs, event banners. By early 2026, some images existed in more than a dozen near-identical versions across different subdirectories, each carrying a slightly different file name and metadata tag.

The University of Wollongong's digital communications unit, which maintains its own web estate separately but interacts closely with council on joint precinct projects around the Innovation Campus on Squires Way, had resolved a comparable problem in 2023 after an internal audit found redundant assets were adding measurable overhead to page-load times. That experience informed conversations between UOW's digital team and council staff earlier this year, according to council documents tabled at the April ordinary meeting.

Council's April meeting papers noted the image library review was one component of a broader digital infrastructure program budgeted at just under $340,000 for the 2025–26 financial year. The duplicate-image replacement component was not separately costed in public documents, but the papers described it as a prerequisite for the rollout of a new digital asset management system scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

The Practical Fallout Across Illawarra Services

The consequences were not purely technical. Staff in the council's planning and environment directorate, based at the Civic Centre on Burelli Street, flagged in internal correspondence — released under a Government Information (Public Access) request in May — that broken image references on development application tracking pages were generating complaints from residents in suburbs including Fairy Meadow, Corrimal and Thirroul. In some cases, map thumbnails linked to DA applications were simply not rendering, forcing residents to download full PDF attachments to see basic site diagrams.

For a council area where housing supply and affordability is one of the most contested political issues — median house prices in Wollongong's inner suburbs exceeded $1.1 million in the March 2026 quarter, according to figures published by NSW Valuer General — any friction in the DA process attracts scrutiny.

The Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation, which coordinates regional digital services across member councils, has since flagged the Wollongong experience as a case study for its 2026–27 shared-services review. That review is due to report to member councils in September.

For residents and local businesses, the immediate practical step is straightforward: if council web pages linked to from planning documents, event listings, or the Wollongong Art Gallery's online collection are returning broken images or slow-loading pages, the council's digital services team is actively accepting reports via the standard customer service portal. The full asset library rollout is scheduled to go live before October. Until then, the legacy system remains partly in place — a reminder that even the most routine infrastructure decisions can compound quietly for years before anyone looks hard enough to notice.