Duplicate Image Replacement: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Wollongong City Council is facing mounting pressure to address a backlog of duplicate and outdated images embedded across its planning portal, community services directory and heritage registers — a problem that digital records specialists say is undermining the accuracy of publicly accessible documents and slowing development application assessments at a time when the city can least afford delays.

The issue has gained urgency this winter. With the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund currently active and BlueScope Steel's green steel transition generating a wave of new environmental and planning submissions through Port Kembla, the volume of image-heavy technical documents lodged with council has surged. When duplicate or mismatched photographs attach to the wrong property or project file, planners must manually cross-check records — a process that can add days to what are already stretched assessment timelines.

What the Experts Are Saying

Researchers at the University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue have been examining how duplicate digital assets accumulate inside local government systems. The facility's work on data integrity in infrastructure planning is directly relevant: duplicated site photographs, for instance, can cause automated comparison tools to flag false matches between unrelated Crown land parcels and private development sites around Keiraville and Figtree.

Digital records management professionals operating in the NSW local government sector — without being named because they were not authorised to speak publicly — have pointed to a 2024 NSW State Archives and Records Authority guidance update as the benchmark councils should be meeting. That guidance set out clearer obligations around image metadata, retention schedules and deduplication workflows for councils managing more than 50,000 active digital assets. Wollongong City Council's planning portal alone is understood to contain well above that threshold, though the council had not confirmed a specific figure by deadline.

Heritage advocates connected to the Illawarra Historical Society, which operates from its reading room on Market Street in the CBD, have also raised concerns. Duplicate heritage photographs — particularly those covering industrial sites in Port Kembla and the North Wollongong foreshore — can result in misidentification of listed structures, complicating demolition assessments and conservation orders. The society has previously called on council to align its digital image library with the NSW Heritage Register's own deduplication standards, though no formal response has been made public.

Local Programs and What Comes Next

The University of Wollongong's Library and Records team began a phased deduplication review of its own institutional image repositories in early 2025, covering research outputs, campus photography and archived documents stretching back to the institution's founding in 1975. That process, described in the university's 2025 Annual Report, identified several thousand redundant image files within the first six months. Council planners have informally cited that program as a model worth examining for adaptation to a municipal context.

For residents and developers lodging applications through the NSW Planning Portal — which processes submissions for the entire Wollongong local government area — the practical advice from records specialists is straightforward: submit image files with consistent naming conventions and embedded metadata, including GPS coordinates where relevant, and avoid re-uploading previously submitted photographs under new file names. That last habit is one of the primary drivers of duplication inside council systems.

A council spokesperson confirmed this week that a review of the planning portal's document management settings is scheduled for the third quarter of 2026, but declined to provide details on scope or resourcing. For businesses operating in the North Wollongong Enterprise Corridor and the Port Kembla industrial precinct — where planning submissions are particularly image-intensive — the review cannot come soon enough. The city's development pipeline is too significant, and the margin for administrative error too narrow, for the problem to keep drifting.