How Wollongong's Council Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicate Images — and What It's Going to Take to Fix It

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library contains tens of thousands of image files. A significant portion of those files are duplicates — the same photograph stored under different filenames, across different folders, uploaded at different times by different teams. The council has not published a specific count, but the problem is well understood inside the Crown Street offices, and it is now driving a formal remediation process.

The timing matters. Wollongong is mid-way through a broader digital infrastructure overhaul tied to the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund commitments, with several council departments migrating to unified content management platforms before the end of the 2026-27 financial year. Carrying duplicate assets into a new system multiplies licensing costs, slows search functions and creates compliance headaches around image rights — particularly for photographs sourced from third-party contributors during events at WIN Entertainment Centre or the redeveloped Wollongong Botanic Garden.

How the Duplicates Accumulated

The roots go back roughly fifteen years. Between 2010 and 2018, Wollongong Council ran at least three separate digitisation drives — one linked to the Wollongong City Library's local history collection on Kembla Street, one tied to the tourism unit promoting Flagstaff Hill and the northern beaches corridor, and a third managed by the communications team for media releases. Each team operated its own folder structure. There was no single controlled vocabulary, no mandatory file-naming convention, and no automated deduplication check at the point of upload.

The council's move to a shared SharePoint environment around 2019 merged these repositories without first auditing them. Staff who needed a photograph of, say, Port Kembla Harbour for a planning submission would often re-upload an image they found on a desktop drive rather than search the shared library — which was slow and poorly indexed. The result was geometric: each migration event roughly doubled the redundancy rate for heavily used subject areas like the steelworks precinct, Belmore Basin, and the northern suburbs.

Community organisations that regularly collaborate with council — including the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre and several neighbourhood renewal groups operating under the Stronger Communities program in suburbs such as Warrawong and Dapto — experienced the downstream effect as broken image links in co-branded publications and mismatched photo credits in grant acquittals.

The Current Remediation Effort

Council engaged a records management contractor earlier this year to begin a systematic deduplication pass across the primary asset library. The work involves both automated hash-matching software — which identifies byte-for-byte identical files regardless of filename — and a manual review layer for near-duplicate images where cropping or compression differences fool the algorithm.

The project scope, as outlined in council's February 2026 ordinary meeting business papers, covers approximately 340,000 image files. The contractor's work is expected to run through to October 2026. That timeline is tight given the platform migration deadline, and council's records team has flagged that older files tied to the Wollongong Heritage Study — a document dating to 1993 that underpins planning decisions across the inner city — require particular care before any deletion is authorised.

For residents and local organisations, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Any group that has received council-supplied imagery for newsletters, grant applications or event collateral in the past five years should audit their own file holdings before the October cutover. After the new digital asset management system goes live, legacy file paths will break. The council's records team, reachable through the Crown Street civic centre, has indicated it will publish a transition guide, though a release date had not been confirmed as of this week.

The broader lesson from Wollongong's experience is one being replicated in local government offices across New South Wales: rapid digitisation without governance frameworks creates storage debt that eventually has to be repaid, and the interest compounds with every additional migration cycle. Getting the library clean before the next platform move is not optional — it's the only way to avoid repeating the cycle again in another decade.