Wollongong's Digital Asset Chaos: The Key Decisions Council Must Make Before Year's End

Wollongong City Council is sitting on a digital hoarding problem that its own IT division now estimates has duplicated more than 40,000 image files across at least six separate content management systems, creating storage costs that have quietly ballooned past $180,000 annually. The audit, completed in late June, was triggered after the council's Communications branch discovered multiple versions of the same Crown Street Mall promotional photographs being used simultaneously across the council website, the Destination Wollongong tourism portal, and the internal staff intranet — with different copyright attributions attached to each.

The timing is uncomfortable. The state government's Digital Information Security Policy, updated in March 2026, requires all NSW local councils to demonstrate compliant asset management practices by December 31 this year or face restrictions on accessing Service NSW shared infrastructure. For Wollongong, which relies heavily on that shared infrastructure to process development applications through the NSW Planning Portal, non-compliance is not a theoretical risk.

What the audit actually found

The problem is structural, not accidental. When Destination Wollongong — the council-backed tourism body operating out of offices near WIN Entertainment Centre on Harbour Street — built its own content platform in 2019, it drew on the same photo library as the council's main website without establishing a single source of truth. The University of Wollongong's community engagement unit, which has a content-sharing arrangement with the council under the 2023 Illawarra Futures Partnership MOU, added a third thread to the tangle. By the time the BlueScope Steel community liaison team began uploading Port Kembla industrial transition imagery to a shared Dropbox folder in 2024, the duplication was systemic.

Storage is only part of the cost. Council's digital team estimates that staff across six departments spend a combined 120 hours per month searching for, verifying, and re-uploading image files that already exist somewhere in the system. At average council administrative wage rates, that works out to roughly $74,000 a year in absorbed labour — on top of the storage bill.

The decisions ahead

Three options are on the table heading into a council workshop scheduled for August 12. The first is a centralised Digital Asset Management platform — products like Bynder or Canto are under evaluation — which would cost between $60,000 and $95,000 to implement and require a dedicated part-time administrator. The second option is a lighter-touch solution using the council's existing Microsoft SharePoint licensing, which IT officers say could handle roughly 70 percent of the problem for minimal additional outlay but would leave Destination Wollongong and UOW operating semi-independently. The third option, doing the minimum necessary to satisfy the December compliance deadline and revisiting the broader issue in 2027, has already drawn internal criticism as a short-term patch.

Whatever the council decides, it will need to resolve a copyright question that the audit flagged as unresolved: at least 3,200 images in the system have no clear licensing record, meaning the council cannot confirm it has the right to publish them. Some date back to photographs commissioned for the 2015 Wollongong Waterfront Masterplan. Legal advice sought from council solicitors puts the theoretical liability exposure in the low six figures if any of those images are found to belong to a third party still actively enforcing rights.

Community and cultural organisations that have content-sharing agreements with the council — including Wollongong Art Gallery on Burelli Street and the Science Space venue in Squires Way, Fairy Meadow — will also need to be brought into whatever solution is chosen, since their imagery sits in the same ecosystem.

The August 12 workshop is open for public observation under Council's ordinary meeting procedures. Residents or organisations with submissions on the digital asset policy can lodge them through the council's Your Say Illawarra engagement portal before August 5. The council's full IT and Communications committee report, which will include the cost-benefit analysis for each option, is expected to be publicly available by July 25.