How Wollongong's council archives ended up full of the same photo twice, and what it cost to fix it

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contained more than 40,000 image files by early 2025. A significant portion of those files, according to internal records flagged during a routine audit, were duplicates, the same photograph saved under different file names, across multiple folders, sometimes three or four times over. The clean-up that followed took months and cost ratepayers in staff hours and contractor time that the council has not yet publicly itemised.

The problem did not arrive overnight. Understanding how Wollongong ended up here requires tracing about fifteen years of digital storage decisions, departmental siloes, and procurement choices that nobody at the time thought would matter much.

From film to folders: how the archive grew without rules

The council's communications team began digitising its photographic archive in earnest around 2010, when the former Wollongong City Library on Kembla Street was being used as a temporary document repository during building works nearby. Staff scanned prints and slides onto shared network drives. The problem was that no single naming convention was ever agreed upon. A photograph of the Crown Street Mall redevelopment taken in 2011 might live in a folder labelled by year, another labelled by project, and a third labelled by the photographer's initials, all simultaneously, all valid, all creating copies.

By the time cloud storage arrived as standard practice around 2017, the damage was structural. Migration tools pulled entire folder trees into new systems without deduplication checks. Every legacy copy came along for the ride. The same aerial shot of Port Kembla Harbour, a stock image used constantly in economic development materials, was found in 23 separate locations during last year's audit.

Regional development bodies made things more complicated. The Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation, which coordinates planning and advocacy across four local government areas, maintains its own image library separate from Wollongong City Council's. BlueScope Steel, whose operations at Port Kembla are a constant feature of regional promotional photography, has its own communications archive. When organisations collaborate on grant applications or event materials, as they did repeatedly through the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund rounds between 2019 and 2023, images get shared by email, downloaded, renamed, and re-uploaded. Each exchange was another duplication event.

The audit, and what it revealed

The 2024-25 audit, conducted across the second half of last financial year, found that duplicated files were consuming roughly 1.2 terabytes of storage on the council's primary server, a figure that translates directly into ongoing cloud hosting costs under the Microsoft Azure agreement the council moved to in 2022. Storage is not free, and at enterprise pricing, a terabyte adds up across a three-year contract.

The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Business and Law has in recent years produced research examining digital asset management failures in Australian local government, with the Illawarra region cited as a case study in how rapid digitisation without governance frameworks creates compounding costs. That body of work, published through the university's Smart Infrastructure Facility on Squires Way, Fairy Meadow, pointed to the period between 2015 and 2020 as the critical window when most councils locked in bad habits.

The duplicate image problem also had a practical, public-facing dimension. Residents searching the council's online gallery for images of Flagstaff Hill or the Nan Tien Temple area for community publications would retrieve multiple near-identical results, with no metadata to distinguish the most current or highest-resolution version. Staff routinely downloaded whichever copy loaded first.

Fixing it has required a combination of automated deduplication software, the council adopted a tool in March 2026, and manual review for images where metadata was stripped or corrupted during old migrations. The manual review is ongoing.

For organisations in the region still managing their own image libraries without a governance policy, the council's experience offers a practical prompt: audit now, before migration to any new system, and establish a single naming convention that travels with every file. The cost of doing it properly the first time is considerably lower than doing it twice, which is, after all, exactly the problem Wollongong spent years trying to solve.