Wollongong's Digital Image Problem: The Hidden Numbers Behind Council's Duplicate Photo Headache

Wollongong City Council's digital records unit is sitting on an estimated library of more than 40,000 image files, a significant portion of which contain duplicates, mislabelled entries or low-resolution replacements that were uploaded without removing the originals. The problem, which has quietly accumulated over more than a decade of piecemeal digitisation, is now forcing a formal audit of the council's asset management system ahead of a planned migration to a new platform later this year.

The timing matters. Across NSW, local governments are under mounting pressure from the NSW State Archives and Records Authority to comply with the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009, which sets specific standards for the accuracy and retrievability of digital records. Councils that cannot demonstrate clean, non-duplicated image archives risk compliance findings that can trigger mandatory remediation programs — at cost to ratepayers.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Internal figures tabled at a Wollongong City Council ordinary meeting in June 2026 — documents reviewed by The Daily Wollongong — indicated that a preliminary scan of the council's digital asset management system flagged approximately 6,200 files as likely duplicates, representing roughly 15 per cent of the total image library. A further 1,100 files were tagged as "replacement images" where the original file had not been deleted, meaning both versions existed simultaneously under different file names. The audit was conducted by the council's records management team based out of the Wollongong City Library on Kembla Street in the CBD.

The cost of fixing the problem is not trivial. Digital asset remediation work of this scale, based on comparable projects undertaken by Lake Macquarie City Council in 2024 and Shoalhaven City Council in early 2025, typically runs between $45,000 and $120,000 depending on whether the work is done in-house or contracted out. Wollongong's records unit currently has two full-time staff dedicated to digital asset management, a number that has not changed since 2019 despite the library growing by an estimated 12,000 files over that same period.

The duplicate image issue has downstream consequences that go beyond storage costs. The council's communications team, which draws on the digital library to produce materials for major projects including the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone consultation documents and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation's regional planning work, has reported instances of outdated or incorrect images being used in public-facing documents because the correct replacement file was not properly linked in the system. In at least three cases identified during the June audit, images of Crown Street Mall infrastructure works from 2018 were still appearing in search results ahead of more recent 2024 photography.

What Happens From Here

The council's records team is expected to present a remediation roadmap to the council's Environment and Planning committee by September 2026. The proposed approach involves a phased deduplication process using automated hash-matching software to identify pixel-identical files, followed by a manual review of near-duplicate images — photographs taken within seconds of each other, for example — that the software cannot automatically resolve.

For organisations outside the council that rely on Wollongong's public image datasets — including the University of Wollongong's built environment faculty, which uses council photography in urban planning research, and local media outlets — the practical advice for now is straightforward: cross-check image metadata dates before publication or submission. Files with creation dates that predate 2021 and carry generic naming conventions such as "IMG_" followed by a number sequence are most likely to be superseded versions that have not yet been formally retired from the system.

The broader lesson from Wollongong's experience is one other regional councils across NSW are quietly grappling with: digitisation without ongoing curation creates its own form of disorder. Adding images to a system is the easy part. Knowing which ones to trust is the harder problem, and right now the numbers suggest Wollongong has about 7,300 reasons to take that seriously.