Wollongong Council's Digital Archive Overhaul Hits a Snag Over Thousands of Duplicate Images

Wollongong City Council's effort to modernise its public-facing development application portal ran into a concrete obstacle this week, when staff identified a significant cache of duplicate images lodged within the system's document management backend. The problem — competing file versions of the same site photographs uploaded multiple times across different application records — is slowing the processing of submissions lodged through the NSW Planning Portal, which the council has been migrating records into since late 2025.

The timing is awkward. Council is under pressure from both the state government's housing supply targets and a surge in Port Kembla rezoning inquiries tied to the renewable energy precinct development along Redfern Street and Forrest Road. Any bottleneck in the DA queue feeds directly into delays for proponents already navigating an overloaded approvals pipeline.

What Triggered the Problem

The duplicate image issue stems from a bulk data migration that began in March 2026, when council moved legacy records from its older TechOne content management system into the updated NSW Planning Portal framework. During that transfer, automated scripts failed to detect near-identical image files uploaded by applicants and their consultants — a known limitation when migrating across systems that store files under different naming conventions. A single site might hold four or five versions of the same drone photograph, each tagged to a separate application reference number.

The backlog became visible to council officers this week during a routine quality audit of applications lodged in the Crown Street and Keira Street corridors of the Wollongong CBD, where a cluster of medium-density residential proposals has been sitting in pre-assessment since May. Staff identified more than 200 application records in the Wollongong local government area containing at least one set of duplicate image files, according to council's internal triage log reviewed by The Daily Wollongong. The council has not publicly released the full scope of affected applications.

Duplicate image replacement — the manual or scripted process of identifying, removing, and re-linking the correct file version — is now listed as a priority task for the council's IT and development assessment teams through July. The University of Wollongong's Smart Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue, which has an existing data services arrangement with the council, has been approached to provide technical advice on automating the deduplication process, though no formal contract has been announced.

Practical Impact on Applicants

For residents and developers with applications currently in the queue, the disruption is real. Council's customer service centre on Burelli Street confirmed this week that pre-assessment timelines for affected applications have been extended by up to 15 business days while the duplicates are resolved. Applicants whose files are caught in the affected batch were being contacted directly by council officers as of Thursday, July 3.

The delay adds friction at a moment when housing approvals across the Illawarra Shoalhaven region are already under scrutiny. NSW Government data published in June 2026 showed Wollongong approved 1,847 new dwellings in the 2024–25 financial year, below the target embedded in the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Plan 2041. A processing slowdown, even a temporary one, draws attention from state planners watching whether councils are meeting their housing delivery benchmarks.

Council says it expects the bulk of duplicate replacements to be completed by July 18, with a revised audit of the portal's image database to follow in August. Applicants who believe their submission is affected can check their application status through the NSW Planning Portal using their DA reference number, or contact council's development assessment team directly at the Burelli Street office. Those lodging new applications from this week are advised to clearly label all image files with unique identifiers before upload, a step council officers say will prevent the problem recurring as the migration continues.