Wollongong Council's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happened This Week

Wollongong City Council's communications and records management teams spent the better part of this week sorting through a backlog of duplicate images discovered inside the council's centralised digital asset management system — a problem that, according to internal documentation circulated to councillors ahead of the July 7 ordinary meeting, has been building since the platform was upgraded in late 2024.

The duplication issue matters right now for a specific reason. Council is mid-way through publishing the refreshed Wollongong Local Environmental Plan supporting materials online, including aerial photography of the Port Kembla renewal corridor and updated imagery of infrastructure along Burelli Street and the Crown Street Mall precinct. Duplicate files in the asset library risk wrong images being attached to planning documents visible to residents and developers making decisions about land use, building applications and zoning appeals.

How the Problem Surfaced

The issue came to light after staff at the Wollongong City Library's local studies collection, based at the cnr Kembla and Burelli Streets civic precinct, flagged that several digitised heritage photographs appeared twice in the shared internal archive — in some cases with different metadata tags describing the same location differently. That discrepancy was escalated to the council's ICT directorate, which ran a broader sweep of the asset library and identified the larger-scale duplication across contemporary operational photography.

The library's local studies unit had been working since February 2026 to integrate approximately 1,400 newly digitised images of the Illawarra into the shared system as part of the Illawarra Heritage Digitisation Project, a program jointly supported by the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation and the State Library of NSW. That ingestion process, staff believe, contributed to the file duplication when automated batch uploads failed to reconcile existing entries against incoming ones.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue has a standing data governance partnership with the council, and staff there were contacted this week to advise on deduplication protocols. The facility's involvement is not unusual — it has provided technical support on several council data projects since 2022 — but its engagement at this stage signals the council is treating the remediation as more than a routine IT cleanup.

What It Means for Planning Documents and Public Records

The practical stakes are real. Wollongong's development application portal processed 312 applications in the March 2026 quarter, according to figures published in the council's quarterly performance report released in May. Each application can involve multiple image attachments drawn from the central library. If duplicate files carry inconsistent geotag or date metadata, a planner or an applicant's architect pulling a reference image could, in theory, retrieve an outdated photograph rather than a current one.

Council has not confirmed publicly how many documents may have been affected or whether any development applications already lodged contain misfiled images. The records management review is expected to produce a preliminary findings report before the July 21 council meeting, at which point councillors are likely to consider whether a formal audit scope needs to be put to tender.

For residents with active development applications — particularly those in the Port Kembla Special Activation Precinct and the Gwynneville and Keiraville medium-density corridors, where rezoning activity has picked up sharply this year — the practical advice is straightforward: if your application references council-supplied imagery or mapping, contact the development services counter at the Thistlethwaite Street offices to confirm the image files attached to your submission carry the correct metadata and capture date. Council staff can manually verify individual file records while the broader deduplication work continues.

The remediation timetable currently sits at six to eight weeks, running through to late August 2026. Whether the Illawarra Heritage Digitisation Project ingestion resumes before that work is complete has not been confirmed.