How the Central Coast is tackling duplicate image replacement — and where it stands against cities doing it better

Central Coast Council's digital asset library holds thousands of images accumulated across two merged councils, years of administration, and multiple website rebuilds — and a significant share of those images are duplicates, some appearing dozens of times across council's public-facing platforms. The problem is neither trivial nor unusual, but how the council addresses it will shape the efficiency and cost of its ongoing Gosford CBD digital renewal push.

The timing matters. Central Coast Council only emerged from state-appointed administration in late 2021 after a financial crisis that forced deep cuts across departments, including communications and digital services. Rebuilding those teams while simultaneously refreshing the council's web presence — including content tied to the Gosford CBD renewal precinct along Mann Street and the broader Waterfront development corridor — has meant digital housekeeping has lagged behind more visible infrastructure work.

What duplicate images actually cost

The issue is more than clutter. Duplicate digital assets inflate storage costs, slow content management systems, and create version-control headaches when, say, an outdated aerial photograph of Gosford's Central Coast Conservatorium of Music site circulates alongside a current one. For councils using cloud-based content platforms — which Central Coast migrated to as part of its post-administration technology overhaul — duplicated storage can compound licensing and bandwidth costs. Industry benchmarks cited by the Australian Local Government Association suggest digital asset management inefficiencies can consume between 10 and 15 percent of a communications team's productive hours annually, though that figure varies widely by council size.

Comparable regional councils in NSW have taken different approaches. Newcastle City Council, which completed a digital transformation program in 2023, implemented an automated deduplication layer within its content management system that flags visually similar images before upload, reducing its asset library by roughly 30 percent in the first 12 months of operation. Lake Macquarie City Council adopted a manual audit cycle — a quarterly review conducted by a two-person digital team — which is cheaper upfront but slower to produce results.

Globally, the contrast is sharper. Rotterdam's municipal digital team, which manages content across a city of roughly 660,000 people, deployed AI-assisted image hash-matching across its entire asset library in 2024, cutting the duplicate rate from an estimated 22 percent to under four percent within six months. The program cost approximately €80,000 to implement. Closer to home, Wellington City Council in New Zealand completed a comparable project in 2025 using open-source tooling, bringing its duplicate rate down to under six percent at a fraction of the cost by embedding the audit into its existing Drupal content pipeline.

Where the Central Coast program currently sits

Central Coast Council's digital team, operating out of its Gosford administration offices on Wyong Road, Gosford, has acknowledged the scale of the problem internally but has not yet committed to a formal deduplication program with a published timeline or budget allocation. The council's current four-year Resourcing Strategy, adopted in 2024, includes a line for digital services improvement but does not itemise image asset management as a distinct workstream.

Residents and businesses engaging with council's online platforms — particularly through the Your Voice Our Coast consultation portal used for projects including the proposed Gosford waterfront activation — occasionally encounter broken or mismatched images that point to the underlying asset disorder.

The practical path forward is reasonably well-defined, based on what comparable councils have done. A scoping audit, achievable within a single financial quarter using two staff members and off-the-shelf duplicate-detection software, would give council a baseline figure for the size of the problem. From there, a phased cleanup — prioritising high-traffic pages and consultation portals first — has worked for councils of similar size. The key variable is budget: automated tooling costs more upfront but saves staff hours over a three-to-five-year horizon, while manual audits are accessible immediately within existing headcount.

With the Gosford CBD renewal generating fresh digital content at pace, and the council's post-administration credibility still being rebuilt, getting the underlying infrastructure right before the next wave of content lands is the more efficient sequence. Other cities figured that out a year or two ago. The Central Coast still has time to catch up.