Central Coast Council Tackles Digital Archive Mess as Duplicate Image Problem Gets a Fix This Week

Central Coast Council has begun a systematic audit of its internal digital image libraries this week, moving to resolve a duplicate-file problem that has complicated planning document searches, delayed social media publishing workflows, and cluttered the content management system used to maintain suburb and project pages on the council website.

The cleanup matters right now for a specific reason. Council is mid-way through the Gosford City Centre Revitalisation program, and the public-facing project pages — which document streetscape upgrades along Mann Street and the redevelopment activity around the Gosford Waterfront precinct — have been accumulating duplicate images since at least the 2021 period when the council was still emerging from state-appointed administration. Redundant files slow load times on those pages and have, in at least some instances, caused the wrong version of a rendered design image to appear alongside planning documents lodged through the NSW Planning Portal.

What Happened This Week

Staff within Council's Digital and Customer Experience team spent the first three days of this week running a deduplication script across the asset management repository. The process was extended to the separate image library attached to the Gosford-Wyong Regional Economic Development Strategy communications folder on Thursday. The work is not glamorous. It involves comparing file metadata, flagging identical or near-identical JPEGs and PNGs, routing flagged files to a review queue, and then either archiving or permanently deleting the excess copies.

The practical trigger was a complaint from a Terrigal-based development consultancy, which reported in late June that a development application search for a mixed-use site near Terrigal Drive returned a thumbnail image from an unrelated Gosford CBD project — a symptom of the underlying duplication error. Council's records management policy, last updated in 2023, requires that public-facing planning documents carry correctly matched imagery, so the mismatch created a compliance obligation to act.

The broader context is that councils across New South Wales have been migrating legacy file systems since the state government's push toward the Integrated Planning and Reporting framework accelerated after 2022. For Central Coast, which merged the former Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council into a single entity in 2016 and then entered administration in 2020, the digital estate inherited two separate, incompatible image tagging conventions. Files from the old Gosford system used location-based naming; Wyong files used project-code naming. Neither convention was enforced consistently, and years of uploads created tens of thousands of files with no reliable unique identifier.

What It Means for Residents and Developers

For most Gosford and Tuggerah residents the direct impact is modest but real. Anyone using the Council website to track a DA near the Kibble Park precinct or check progress images for the Central Coast Stadium redevelopment should find accurate, correctly matched images within the next two to three weeks as the remediated library goes live in stages. Council's current website uses a content management system hosted under a contract that runs until March 2027, and the deduplication work is being done inside that existing contract scope — no new spending has been announced.

Developers and planning consultants working on projects along the Wyong Town Centre renewal corridor are the group with most at stake in the short term. Incorrectly matched images on publicly exhibited documents can, in rare cases, trigger re-exhibition requirements under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, which adds weeks and costs to a project timeline. Avoiding that outcome was cited internally as one of the reasons the audit was escalated this week rather than deferred to the next scheduled system review in October.

Council has not published a formal completion date for the full deduplication project. The staged rollout will cover the Gosford and Wyong planning portals first, followed by the tourism and economic development image libraries, which include promotional photography of The Entrance foreshore and Bouddi National Park. Anyone who submitted a formal records access request to Council since May 1 and received documents with suspect imagery is advised to contact the records management team directly through the Council website's customer service portal to request a verified re-issue.