How the Central Coast Stacks Up Against Global Rivals on Duplicate Image Replacement

Central Coast Council is quietly working through a backlog of duplicate and outdated images embedded across its website, planning portal and community engagement platforms — a housekeeping task that sounds mundane until you realise it is costing the council measurable staff hours each week and eroding trust in digital services that residents increasingly rely on for development applications, flood maps and infrastructure updates.

The problem is not unique to Gosford. Municipal administrations from Wollongong to Wellington, New Zealand, and from Newcastle upon Tyne to Nantes in western France have all confronted the same issue as they migrated legacy content management systems to cloud-based platforms during the early 2020s. What differs is the pace and method of resolution — and on both counts, the Central Coast is lagging behind some of its international counterparts, though not by as wide a margin as critics sometimes suggest.

What the Local Picture Looks Like

Central Coast Council's digital transformation program, which accelerated after the council emerged from state administration in May 2021, has so far consolidated several content libraries into a single asset management system. The council's Gosford-based digital services team — operating out of the Baker Street administrative precinct — identified more than 4,000 image assets flagged as potential duplicates in an internal audit completed in the second half of 2025, according to agenda papers published on the council's public meeting portal. Of those, fewer than half had been resolved by the time the audit report was tabled.

The Erina Fair precinct renewal project and the Gosford CBD revitalisation corridor, which stretches from Mann Street down toward the Gosford waterfront, have both generated large volumes of promotional and planning imagery since 2022. That content, produced by multiple contractors and internal teams, fed directly into the duplication problem — the same aerial shot of the Gosford foreshore, for instance, appearing under at least three separate file names across different departmental folders.

The Central Coast Regional Library network, which serves branches including Gosford, Wyong and Tuggerah, ran a parallel deduplication exercise for its digitised local history collection in late 2024. Library staff identified roughly 600 duplicate image records in the Gosford-area photographic holdings alone — a relatively contained problem compared to the council's broader web estate, but one that drew attention to how fragmented digital governance had become during the years the council was under administrator control.

How Other Cities Are Tackling the Same Problem

Newcastle City Council in the United Kingdom began a structured duplicate image removal program in January 2024 as part of its migration to the Umbraco content management platform. By March 2025, Newcastle had reduced its web image library by approximately 38 percent, a figure published in the council's digital services annual report. Nantes Métropole in France took a different approach, deploying automated hash-matching software across its entire digital estate in 2023, cutting duplicate assets by more than half within six months.

Wollongong City Council, the most directly comparable NSW local government area given its similar population size of roughly 220,000 residents, completed a full image audit and deduplication exercise in mid-2024 following its own cloud migration. Wollongong's digital team worked with the state government's GovTech NSW program, which offered shared tooling and templates to councils undergoing digital transitions.

Central Coast has not yet accessed the GovTech NSW shared deduplication toolset, though council officers flagged it as a potential resource in the same 2025 audit report. The council's current timeline projects full resolution of its flagged duplicate image backlog by the third quarter of 2026 — a target that, if met, would put it roughly two years behind Newcastle UK but within a year of Wollongong.

For residents using the council's planning portal to track development applications along the Gosford waterfront or in the new residential precincts around Warnervale, the practical effect of unresolved duplication is subtle but real — search results return multiple versions of the same site photograph, making it harder to find the most current image and easier to rely on outdated visual information. The council has advised residents to check document lodgement dates rather than image file names when reviewing application materials. A formal update on the deduplication timeline is expected at the council's next ordinary meeting, scheduled for late July 2026.