How Wollongong's council website ended up riddled with duplicate images — and what's being done about it

Wollongong City Council's public-facing website contains hundreds of instances of duplicate imagery spread across planning, tourism and community service pages — a problem that digital auditors say accumulated gradually over nearly seven years and now requires a structured remediation program to fix.

The issue matters now because NSW councils are under increasing pressure to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 compliance requirements, with the state government having signalled in its 2024–25 Digital Government Strategy that public agencies failing accessibility benchmarks risk exclusion from certain grant categories. Duplicate images — particularly those carrying redundant or conflicting alt-text — are a direct compliance liability, not merely a cosmetic one.

The roots of the problem trace back to a content management system migration Wollongong City Council undertook around 2019, when the organisation moved from an older platform to a newer CMS. During that transition, image assets were bulk-imported without deduplication, meaning the same photograph — of Crown Street Mall, Flagstaff Hill, or the Nan Tien Temple precinct — could exist under dozens of different file names in the media library. Staff uploading new content in subsequent years pulled from that library without realising they were adding a third or fourth copy of an image already embedded elsewhere on the same page.

A familiar problem with an unglamorous history

Digital content specialists who work across local government describe this as a textbook legacy migration issue. The Wollongong situation is not unique — the City of Newcastle faced a comparable audit finding in 2022 — but the Illawarra council's site has grown substantially in scope since 2019 as new pages were added for programs including the Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation's regional economic initiatives and BlueScope Steel's community liaison hub hosted through council's industrial lands planning portal.

Port Kembla's rezoning documents, published progressively since 2021 as the NSW government developed its Renewable Energy Zone policy framework for the precinct, added further volume to the site. Each planning update brought new maps, diagrams and photographic records. Without a consistent image-naming convention or mandatory deduplication step in the publishing workflow, the library grew chaotic. By mid-2025, a routine internal content audit reportedly flagged more than 400 individual duplicate image instances across the site's planning and development subdirectories alone — though the council has not publicly released that figure.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility, which has a research relationship with council on smart city data projects, identified the duplicate-image problem as a secondary finding during a broader digital accessibility review conducted in the second half of 2025. That review was partly prompted by council's application for funding under the NSW Government's $38 million Digital Restart Fund, which requires applicants to demonstrate a clear remediation pathway for known accessibility deficiencies before approval.

What a fix actually involves

Remediation is not a single action. Content teams must first run an automated crawl to catalogue every image URL and hash value across the site — a process that on a council site of Wollongong's size typically takes two to three weeks of machine time followed by several months of manual editorial review. Images that are true duplicates can be consolidated to a single canonical file. Images that appear similar but carry different contextual alt-text — a photograph of Wollongong Harbour used once for a tourism page and once for a heritage overlay document, for instance — require human judgment about which version stays and how the metadata is updated.

The practical cost is non-trivial. Similar remediation projects at comparable regional councils have run to between $40,000 and $120,000 depending on site complexity, though council has not confirmed any specific budget allocation for this work.

For residents and businesses using the council website to navigate development applications on Crown Street, access community centre bookings at the Coniston Neighbourhood Centre, or track progress on the Port Kembla Energy Terminal approvals, the impact is mostly invisible — pages load, images appear. The compliance and administrative stakes, though, are real. Council officers have been advised to halt any further bulk image uploads to the affected subdirectories until a new workflow protocol is confirmed, a holding measure expected to remain in place through at least the end of the third quarter of 2026.