How Wollongong's Public Record Got Cluttered With Duplicate Images — And What It Cost the Region

Wollongong City Council's digital asset library currently holds thousands of images flagged as duplicates — photographs of the same Crown Street Mall shopfronts, the same Port Kembla industrial skyline, the same Flagstaff Hill lookout across multiple file formats — and the clean-up job that's now underway didn't happen overnight. It is the result of more than a decade of fragmented digital procurement, departmental siloes, and a procurement culture that prioritised speed over system integrity.

The problem matters right now because the council is mid-way through a broader digital transformation program tied to the Illawarra Shoalhaven Regional Development Fund's push to modernise local government infrastructure. Duplicate image files are not merely an aesthetic annoyance; they inflate server storage costs, slow down public-facing web properties, compromise accessibility compliance under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 standard, and create legal exposure when licensing metadata is duplicated alongside the wrong file version.

How the Duplication Built Up Over Years

The pattern is common to mid-sized councils. Wollongong's digital communications function was distributed across at least four separate teams between roughly 2012 and 2022 — tourism, economic development, infrastructure communications, and the mayor's office — each operating its own file storage system. When the council migrated to a unified content management system in 2022, assets were bulk-imported without deduplication protocols. Staff at the time were working under tight deadlines to align with the NSW Government's digital services modernisation agenda, and a systematic audit was deferred.

The University of Wollongong's SMART Infrastructure Facility, which has a longstanding research relationship with the council on digital systems, identified the duplication problem as part of a broader data governance review completed in late 2024. That review found that duplicated media assets were consuming a disproportionate share of the council's cloud storage allocation — a finding consistent with patterns seen in comparable regional councils across New South Wales.

Local institutions beyond the council compound the issue. The Wollongong Art Gallery on Kembla Street, the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre, and destination marketing body Destination Wollongong have all historically supplied overlapping image libraries to council communications staff, often without consistent file naming conventions or embedded licensing data. The same photograph of the WIN Entertainment Centre car park during a festival, for instance, might exist in six slightly different crops across three separate departmental drives.

The Practical Cost and the Path to Resolution

Cloud storage is not free. Commercial object storage pricing from major Australian providers has sat in the range of $20 to $30 per terabyte per month for uncompressed archival tiers, and councils holding tens of thousands of unmanaged duplicate files can accumulate meaningful costs over multi-year contracts. Beyond the dollar figure, duplicated images with conflicting metadata have twice caused incorrect attribution of photography to be published on the council's public website — a reputational and legal risk the council's legal team flagged in internal compliance reviews.

The current remediation project, understood to be running through the second half of 2026, involves automated perceptual hashing tools that compare images pixel-by-pixel to identify near-identical files regardless of file format or minor compression differences. Staff from the council's information management team are cross-referencing results manually before any file is permanently deleted — a cautious approach given that some historical images of demolished Wollongong landmarks, including sites along the northern foreshore redevelopment corridor, exist in only one copy across the duplicated pairs.

For organisations and community groups that regularly submit images to council portals — local sporting clubs, neighbourhood associations in suburbs like Figtree and Fairy Meadow, small business operators on Crown Street — the practical advice from digital records professionals is consistent: submit images with descriptive file names that include the date, location, and photographer's name embedded in the filename itself, not just in an accompanying email. That single habit, had it been standard practice across the council's supplier network a decade ago, would have made this year's clean-up significantly cheaper and faster.