Councils, Archivists and Tech Experts Weigh In on Wollongong's Duplicate Image Problem

Wollongong City Council's online development application portal contains thousands of duplicate property photographs — some files appearing four or five times — slowing assessments and creating confusion for planners working on an already strained housing pipeline. The problem is not unique to local government, but its consequences here are landing at a particularly bad time.

The Illawarra is mid-way through one of its most consequential planning periods in decades. Port Kembla's renewable energy zone is attracting infrastructure proposals. BlueScope Steel's green transition has generated a wave of environmental impact submissions. The Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation is coordinating regional development decisions that depend on shared, searchable digital records. Dirty data — duplicated images, mislabelled files, redundant attachments — is emerging as a genuine administrative bottleneck, according to digital records professionals who work across the region.

The University of Wollongong's library holds more than 2.3 million digitised items in its institutional repository. Archivists there have been working since early 2025 on deduplication workflows that use perceptual hashing — a technique that matches visually similar images even when file names differ — to clear backlogs in regional collections. Staff have described the exercise publicly at sector conferences as yielding significant storage savings, though no finalised figures have been released.

What the Experts Are Saying

Digital preservation specialists at the Wollongong City Libraries service, which manages historical photographic collections including the Illawarra Mercury archive held at the Local Studies collection on Kembla Street, have been among the clearest public voices on what duplication actually costs. The core argument, made at a NSW State Library symposium in March 2026, is that duplicate images are not merely a storage problem — they degrade search quality, expose organisations to version-control errors, and in planning contexts can cause assessors to unknowingly review the same submitted photograph multiple times as if it were new evidence.

Wollongong City Council's information management team has acknowledged the issue in meeting agendas published to its public portal, noting that a review of the DA lodgement system was underway. No completion date has been publicly confirmed. The council uses the Pathway software platform, which is common across NSW local government and has known limitations around automated duplicate detection for image attachments.

At the University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility on Northfields Avenue, researchers working on smart city data systems have pointed to the duplicate image problem as a test case for broader data governance. Their argument: if Wollongong is serious about becoming a data-literate regional city — as outlined in the council's own Digital City Strategy — then image hygiene in public-facing systems is a baseline requirement, not an optional improvement.

Practical Steps Already Being Taken

Several Illawarra organisations have already moved. Shellharbour City Council began a records deduplication project in late 2025, contracting a Newcastle-based digital services firm to audit its property image database. Kiama Municipal Council has embedded duplicate-check protocols into its DA lodgement guidelines, requiring applicants to certify that photographs submitted with development applications are distinct and non-repetitive.

The NSW Department of Planning's ePlanning portal, which aggregates submissions from councils across the state, does not currently run automated deduplication across uploaded image files. That gap is relevant for major projects in the Illawarra — including the Port Kembla offshore wind proposals — where public exhibition periods attract thousands of individual submissions, many containing identical or near-identical photographs.

For residents and small businesses lodging applications through Wollongong City Council's online system, the practical advice from digital records professionals is straightforward: audit your own submissions before lodging. Rename image files descriptively, avoid resubmitting photographs already included in earlier correspondence, and use the council's pre-lodgement meeting service — available through the Wollongong Civic Centre on Burelli Street — to confirm what supporting images assessors actually need. Cleaner submissions move faster, and in a planning office under pressure, that matters.