How Wollongong's digital archives ended up riddled with duplicate images — and what it costs to fix it

The problem did not arrive overnight. Wollongong City Council's digital asset library now holds tens of thousands of image files, a significant portion of which are duplicate or near-duplicate records — the same photograph of Crown Street Mall appearing under three different file names, or aerial shots of Port Kembla's steelworks stored separately by the economic development team, the communications unit and the heritage records office. The duplication is structural, and it has been building for roughly a decade.

The timing matters because the council is mid-way through a broader digital transformation program tied to its 2025–2030 Integrated Planning Framework, which commits Wollongong to consolidating its digital infrastructure as the city positions itself around the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone and the broader green-steel transition at BlueScope Steel's site on Five Islands Road. Messy back-end systems make that repositioning harder to communicate externally — and more expensive to run internally.

How the duplication built up

Three distinct phases created the current mess. The first was the 2014–2016 period when council departments each managed their own file servers with minimal cross-referencing. The heritage team at the Wollongong City Library on Burelli Street, for instance, was digitising historical photographs of the South Coast under a State Library of NSW grant program while the communications team was independently building a press-ready image bank for media releases. Neither library talked to the other's filing system.

The second phase came with website migration. When the council shifted to a new content management system around 2019, contractors bulk-uploaded existing image folders without deduplication, effectively doubling the stored file count. A similar pattern played out at the University of Wollongong, which manages its own substantial digital asset library covering the Northfields Avenue campus and the Innovation Campus at Squires Way — sources familiar with the sector say large institutions routinely emerge from platform migrations carrying 30 to 40 per cent duplicate content, though the specific figure for UOW has not been publicly disclosed.

The third and most significant phase was the COVID-19 digitisation surge of 2020–2021. State and federal stimulus funding pushed councils and cultural institutions across New South Wales to accelerate digitisation projects. Wollongong benefited from Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund allocations directed at digital infrastructure, but the speed of the work outpaced any systematic asset management policy. Staff working remotely uploaded images to shared drives, Microsoft SharePoint folders and the council's formal digital asset management platform simultaneously, with no single point of truth.

What duplicate images actually cost

Storage costs are the visible line item. Cloud storage pricing — typically billed per gigabyte per month by providers including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services — means redundant files carry a direct financial penalty that compounds annually. But the less obvious cost is staff time. When a communications officer preparing a media release about the Shellharbour Road upgrade or a new development at North Wollongong's Stuart Park waterfront has to manually search through duplicate records to find the correct, rights-cleared version of an image, that is billable hours lost.

The metadata problem compounds everything. Duplicate files rarely carry identical metadata. One copy of an aerial photograph of Wollongong Harbour might be tagged as rights-cleared for commercial use; a duplicate from a different upload might carry no rights information at all. Publishing the wrong copy exposes the organisation to licensing liability.

Across local government in New South Wales, the sector body LGNSW has flagged digital asset governance as an emerging compliance issue, though no specific enforcement framework has been finalised as of mid-2026.

For Wollongong, the practical path forward involves three steps that asset management specialists consistently recommend: a deduplification audit using automated hash-matching software to identify identical files; a metadata remediation pass to establish consistent rights and attribution records; and a single-platform policy that routes all new image uploads through one governed system before any department can publish. The council's next quarterly digital governance review, expected in the September 2026 period, is the likely forum where any formal policy response will be considered. Until then, the duplicates keep accumulating.