How Wollongong's Council Website Ended Up Running Duplicate Images — and Why It Took Years to Fix

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library quietly ballooned to more than 14,000 stored image files by early 2026, with internal auditors identifying that roughly a third were duplicate or near-duplicate copies of the same photographs — the same Crown Street Mall shopfronts, the same Port Kembla steelworks horizon shots, the same Nan Tien Temple exterior appearing under four or five different file names. The council confirmed the audit findings at its June 2026 ordinary meeting.

The timing matters. Wollongong is in the middle of an ambitious push to modernise its digital services under the 2025–2030 Digital Transformation Strategy, a program that commits the council to consolidating back-end systems and improving how residents in suburbs from Figtree to Helensburgh interact with council online. Running duplicate image assets is not a trivial inconvenience — it slows page load times, inflates cloud storage costs and creates version-control nightmares when a site needs updating quickly, say during a flood warning or a public health notice.

How the Duplication Built Up Over a Decade

The roots of the problem stretch back to at least 2014, when the council migrated its website to a new content management system. At the time, staff were uploading images manually, often under inconsistent naming conventions. A photograph of Wollongong Harbour taken by one communications officer would be saved as wollongong-harbour-2014.jpg; a colleague uploading the same image for a different page would save it as harbour-shot-final.jpg. Neither file talked to the other inside the system.

Three separate website redesigns followed — in 2016, 2019 and 2023 — and each migration carried the legacy files forward rather than cleaning them out. Staff turnover in the council's communications and digital teams meant institutional knowledge about which files were authoritative and which were redundant walked out the door with departing employees. The Illawarra Regional Information Service, which provides shared IT support to several councils in the region including Shellharbour and Kiama, flagged the issue in a 2022 benchmarking report but remediation was deferred twice due to competing budget priorities.

The financial dimension is concrete. Cloud storage is not free. The council's 2025–26 budget allocated $2.3 million across its information and communications technology functions, and while storage is a fraction of that figure, duplicated assets also consume staff time — estimates from the June audit placed the administrative overhead of managing the bloated library at roughly 0.4 full-time equivalent hours per week across the communications team, time that could be redirected to producing new content about projects like the Port Kembla Renewable Energy Zone precinct or the Shellharbour Road corridor upgrade.

What the Fix Looks Like From Here

Council resolved at the June meeting to engage a digital asset management consultant to run a deduplication pass across the library by October 2026. The process will use hash-matching software to identify identical files and a perceptual similarity algorithm to catch near-duplicates — the slightly-different-crop problem that catches out manual audits. Files confirmed as duplicates will be archived offline rather than deleted outright, giving teams a 12-month recovery window if something turns out to have been removed in error.

Longer term, the council is expected to introduce a mandatory metadata standard for any image uploaded to its content management system from January 2027, requiring a photographer credit, a location tag referencing specific Wollongong suburbs or landmarks, and a unique identifier tied to the council's internal project coding structure. The University of Wollongong's Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences has been approached about a potential student-project partnership to help design the tagging taxonomy, though no formal agreement had been signed as of the council's June meeting.

For residents, the practical upshot is that council web pages — particularly those covering development applications in areas like West Dapto and the Illawarra Escarpment conservation zone — should load faster and display more current photography once the cleanup is complete. It is a minor administrative story, but it illustrates how quickly digital housekeeping debt compounds when an organisation grows without a consistent data governance culture to underpin it.