Wollongong Takes on the Duplicate Image Problem — and How It Stacks Up Against Cities Doing the Same

Wollongong City Council's digital records unit is working through a backlog of duplicate property images embedded across its planning and development portals — a technical problem that, while unglamorous, has real consequences for anyone lodging a development application or searching heritage records in suburbs from Thirroul to Warilla.

The issue sits squarely in the middle of a broader digitisation push that councils across NSW have been pressed to accelerate since the state government mandated online DA lodgement through the NSW Planning Portal. When agencies migrate years of scanned documents and photographs into new systems, duplicate images — identical or near-identical files assigned different reference numbers — accumulate. The result is bloated databases, mismatched records, and, at worst, planning officers working from the wrong version of a site photograph when assessing a sensitive heritage application.

It matters more now because the Illawarra is in the middle of a development surge. The Wollongong Local Housing Strategy targets significant dwelling growth across the LGA through the early 2030s, and Port Kembla's designation as a renewable energy zone under the NSW government's offshore wind program has pushed industrial and infrastructure DA volumes higher. More applications mean more documents, more photographs, and more opportunities for duplication to cause downstream errors.

What Other Cities Are Doing

Comparable industrial-to-green-economy cities have been dealing with this longer. In Gothenburg, Sweden — a steel and port city that began its own green transition in the early 2020s — the municipal records agency deployed automated deduplication software across its planning image library in 2023, cutting redundant files by roughly 34 percent within 18 months, according to the agency's published annual report. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, another post-industrial city with a growing university economy, tackled the problem through a partnership between its city planning department and Carnegie Mellon University's computer science faculty, using hash-matching algorithms to flag identical files before archivists reviewed near-duplicates manually.

Newcastle, NSW — the most directly comparable Australian city in terms of council structure, industrial heritage, and digital transition timeline — completed a records deduplication project for its development application image library in late 2024, contracting the work to a Canberra-based digital archiving firm. The project reportedly took eight months and covered archives dating to the early 2000s, when scanning first began replacing paper files.

Wollongong's approach has been more incremental. The council's library service, based at the Crown Street Mall branch, has separately been digitising historical photographs through a long-running community heritage project, and that collection has its own deduplication protocols. But the planning portal image database — which sits under a different directorate — has not yet undergone a systematic clean-up of the same scope as Newcastle's.

The Local Stakes

The practical effect turns up most visibly in heritage-sensitive precincts. The Wollongong Heritage Study, which informs assessments for properties on the local heritage register, relies on photographic evidence to establish a building's condition and character at different points in time. When duplicate images with conflicting metadata circulate through the system, heritage officers have to manually verify which file is authoritative — adding time to assessments that are already among the more complex in the DA process.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility has done work on spatial data quality that touches on related questions of record integrity in urban systems, though its focus has been on transport and infrastructure datasets rather than council image libraries specifically.

For residents and developers, the practical advice is straightforward: when lodging or tracking a DA through the NSW Planning Portal, download and retain your own copies of every document and image uploaded at the time of submission. If a planning officer requests clarification on a photograph, confirm in writing which file version is being referenced. It is a workaround, not a solution — but until Wollongong City Council commits to a systematic deduplication program with a published timeline, it is the most reliable hedge against a records problem that other cities have already moved to fix.