Central Coast Council Tackles Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Its Digital Asset Register This Week

Central Coast Council confirmed this week it is working through a backlog of duplicate images embedded in its digital asset management system, a technical problem that staff say has been compounding since the council emerged from state administration in 2021. The issue came to a head after the council's Information and Communications Technology team flagged the duplication problem during a broader audit of the planning portal infrastructure, according to a council update published on the agenda for this week's ordinary meeting.

The timing is awkward. Gosford CBD is mid-transformation, with several development applications sitting in the queue for Mann Street and the Kibble Park precinct. Any delay in processing documentation — including site photographs, heritage assessments and subdivision plans lodged as image attachments — adds friction to a pipeline the council cannot afford to slow. The council's planning directorate has been under pressure to reduce DA turnaround times since the administration period, when processing times blew out significantly.

What the Audit Found

The review, which began in the third week of June, identified duplicate image files across multiple categories of the council's records system, including infrastructure inspection photos linked to roads and drainage assets on the NSW Central Coast. Suburbs including Woy Woy, Wyong and Tuggerah were identified in internal documentation as areas with the highest concentration of duplicated asset photographs, partly because those areas have been subject to repeated flood damage inspections since 2021. The council's asset register covers more than 8,500 kilometres of roads, stormwater infrastructure and open space across the local government area, meaning even a modest rate of duplicate files creates a meaningful storage and retrieval burden.

The duplication is not simply a storage cost problem. When duplicate images are tied to the wrong asset record — a known risk during bulk data imports — field crews can be dispatched to locations already inspected, or defects can appear resolved in the system when they are not. That matters in a region where flooding has damaged roads in the Tuggerah Lakes area repeatedly, and where accurate, up-to-date condition records underpin funding submissions to the NSW Government's Fixing Country Roads and local road maintenance programs.

Council records show the ICT audit is targeting roughly 14,000 image files flagged by deduplication software as probable or confirmed duplicates. Staff have been given a resolution deadline of 31 July 2026 for the highest-priority asset categories, primarily stormwater and road infrastructure photography. Lower-priority categories, including parks and recreation venue imagery, are scheduled for a second-pass review in the September quarter.

Why This Week Matters for Residents and Applicants

For anyone with a development application lodged at the Gosford or Wyong council service centres, the practical advice from the council's online planning portal is to ensure all image attachments submitted with applications are labelled clearly and are not uploaded multiple times — a problem the council says it sees regularly with large PDF-embedded photographs. Applications for properties in Erina, Terrigal and Point Clare have historically had the highest rate of resubmission requests related to image file errors, based on council processing data cited in a 2024 operational review.

The council is also rolling out updated guidance through its Development Hub portal, which replaced the older ePlanning interface in late 2023. That guidance, expected to be published before the end of the July school holidays, will include file size limits and naming conventions for photographic attachments — a small but useful change for the dozens of owner-builders and small residential developers who lodge applications without professional planning support.

The duplicate image audit sits inside a larger digital transformation program the council has been running since 2022, backed partly by a state government grant tied to conditions of the administration exit. That program includes a new geographic information system due to go live across the Gosford and Wyong administrative hubs before the end of the 2026 calendar year. Getting the image register clean before that migration is the immediate goal — and the July 31 deadline leaves the ICT team with less than four weeks to get there.