How Wollongong's Council Archives Ended Up Full of Ghost Images — and What's Being Done About It

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contains thousands of duplicate images — some files appearing as many as four or five times — after more than a decade of ad hoc uploads, system migrations and departmental record-keeping that was never properly centralised. The problem has been formally acknowledged by the council's records management team, and a staged remediation program is now underway.

The issue matters right now because the council is mid-way through digitising its broader planning and heritage archives, a project tied to the NSW Government's Digital Records Transition initiative. Duplicate image files inflate storage costs, slow retrieval for planning officers and create legal ambiguity when heritage assessors need to confirm which version of a site photograph is the authoritative one. In a city where development applications on Crown Street, Keira Street and in the Port Kembla precinct are politically sensitive, having the right image on the right file is not a trivial concern.

How the Duplicates Accumulated

The roots of the problem go back to at least 2013, when the council shifted from a legacy content management system to a newer platform. Files were migrated in bulk, but the migration script did not deduplicate. Departments — including the Wollongong Heritage Office, based in the Wollongong City Gallery precinct on Kembla Street, and the Development Assessment division — continued uploading images independently through separate portals. By the time a routine audit flagged the problem in late 2024, the library held well over 40,000 image assets, with estimates suggesting roughly 18 to 22 per cent were either exact duplicates or near-identical versions of the same photograph taken seconds apart.

A second migration in 2019, when the council adopted a new enterprise content management platform, compounded rather than resolved the issue. Staff were advised to re-upload any files they could not locate immediately in the new system, a workaround that seeded a second wave of duplicates across folders associated with the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre and the foreshore Crown Land parcels near Flagstaff Hill. No automated hash-checking was in place at that time to catch identical files at the point of upload.

The broader context is not unique to Wollongong. Councils across New South Wales have struggled with digital asset governance as storage became cheap enough that deleting anything felt unnecessary. The State Archives and Records Authority of NSW flagged the systemic nature of the problem in guidance issued in 2022, noting that local government bodies were increasingly carrying redundant digital records that complicated compliance with the State Records Act 1998.

The Remediation Program and What Comes Next

The current remediation program, which council officers began in earnest in February 2026, has three phases. The first — automated deduplication using perceptual hashing software — has already processed approximately 12,000 files in the planning archive. The second phase involves manual review by records staff of images flagged as near-duplicates rather than exact copies, a more time-consuming task given that two photographs of the same Port Kembla site taken on different dates may look almost identical but carry different evidentiary value for heritage assessments.

The third phase, scheduled for the second half of 2026, will introduce a single-upload gateway for all image assets, replacing the parallel portals used by different departments. The University of Wollongong's School of Computing and Information Technology has been engaged in an advisory capacity, with a small research group assisting the council in evaluating metadata standards for the new system.

For residents and planning applicants, the practical implication is that DA submissions referencing council-held site photographs should, where possible, request a formal certified copy through the council's customer service centre on Burelli Street rather than relying on images downloaded from the public-facing planning portal. Until the remediation program concludes, there is no guarantee that a search result reflects the most current or legally authoritative version of a given image. Council officers have advised that the full program is expected to be complete before the end of the 2026 calendar year.