The Numbers Behind Wollongong's Duplicate Image Problem: How Digital Clutter Is Costing Local Organisations Real Money

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library currently holds tens of thousands of image files accumulated across more than a decade of infrastructure, planning and promotional work. A significant share of those files, according to a governance review tabled at a May 2026 ordinary council meeting, are duplicates — the same photograph saved multiple times across different folders, servers and backup drives. The council's IT division has flagged the problem as a storage cost issue that it wants resolved before a planned cloud migration scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

It is a problem that sounds mundane. It is not. Storage costs money, and redundant image data inflates that cost in ways that compound quietly over years. For institutions in the Illawarra operating on tight budgets — and most of them are — the aggregated waste adds up fast. The timing matters too: with BlueScope Steel accelerating its green steel transition at Port Kembla and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund directing capital toward digital infrastructure projects, local organisations face pressure to clean up their data estates before connecting them to new systems.

What the Numbers Actually Look Like

The scale of the duplicate image problem in institutional settings is well-documented at a national level. Research published by the Australian Research Data Commons in 2024 found that unmanaged duplication accounts for between 20 and 40 per cent of stored data volume across Australian higher-education institutions — a figure that translates directly to unnecessary expenditure on server capacity and cloud licensing fees. Enterprise-grade cloud storage costs in Australia currently sit around $0.023 per gigabyte per month with major providers, meaning a mid-sized organisation storing 10 terabytes of redundant image data spends roughly $2,760 a year on files it does not need. Multiply that across a university, a council and a regional health network and the aggregate figure becomes genuinely significant.

The University of Wollongong's library and research data services team has been working through a digital asset rationalisation program since early 2025. The university's Scholarly Communications unit, based on Innovation Campus on Squires Way in North Wollongong, manages image archives connected to decades of research output. Deduplication tools — software that compares file hashes rather than just filenames — are central to that effort, because the same image saved as both a JPEG and a TIFF, or resized and re-saved, does not share an identical filename even though it is functionally the same photograph.

Wollongong's creative sector faces the same arithmetic. Studios and design businesses clustered around Crown Street and the Keira Street precinct routinely accumulate image libraries across project folders, client drives and backup services. A small studio handling, say, 30 client jobs a year can accumulate 50,000 image files within three years, with duplication rates that industry benchmarks put at around 30 per cent for organisations without a formal asset management policy in place.

Practical Steps Institutions Are Taking Now

Deduplication is not technically difficult, but it requires a decision about what to keep. The core tool is perceptual hashing — an algorithm that generates a fingerprint for each image based on visual content rather than file metadata, meaning near-identical images are flagged even when resaved at different resolutions. Open-source tools such as dupeGuru have been in use for years; enterprise digital asset management platforms used by larger organisations, including those connected to the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District's communications division, offer the same capability at scale with audit trail features required for public-sector governance.

For Wollongong City Council, the cloud migration deadline is the forcing mechanism. Before files move from on-premise servers — including those housed at the Burelli Street civic administration building — to a cloud environment, deduplication will determine both the cost of the migration and the ongoing licensing bill. Council's IT governance documents indicate the target is to reduce total image storage volume by at least 25 per cent before migration begins.

For smaller organisations without dedicated IT staff, the Australian Government's Digital Transformation Agency publishes guidance on data hygiene as part of its Digital Investment Framework. The practical starting point is an audit: count files, run a hash comparison, identify clusters of duplicates, and establish a naming convention that prevents the problem from recurring. The cost of not doing it is measurable, recurring and entirely avoidable.