How the Central Coast Is Tackling Duplicate Image Sprawl — and How It Stacks Up Against Cities Worldwide

Central Coast Council is undertaking a systematic audit of its digital asset management systems, targeting thousands of duplicate images sitting across planning, infrastructure and communications databases — a problem that, according to digital governance specialists, now affects the majority of mid-sized local governments in the developed world.

The timing is not incidental. With the Gosford CBD renewal program generating a steady flood of site photographs, renders, heritage documentation and before-and-after imagery since at least 2022, the council's internal servers have accumulated multiple versions of the same files stored under inconsistent naming conventions across separate departments. Staff working on the Gosford Waterfront precinct and the Mann Street corridor redevelopment have reported pulling up outdated renders instead of current approved plans — a clerical friction that has practical consequences when development applications are under assessment.

A Global Problem With Local Teeth

This is not unique to the Central Coast. The City of Malmö in Sweden — which, like Gosford, has been running a concentrated CBD regeneration program — completed a deduplication overhaul of its municipal image library in 2024 after an internal audit found roughly 34 per cent of stored files were exact or near-exact duplicates, according to a case study published by the Digital Local Government Network. Hamilton in New Zealand, another mid-sized city managing rapid urban renewal, piloted an automated deduplication tool across its resource consent platform in early 2025, cutting retrieval times for consent officers by an estimated 40 per cent.

Central Coast is broadly at the same starting point those cities were two to three years ago. The council emerged from state administration in 2021 following a financial crisis that had seen it rack up debts exceeding $565 million, according to figures cited in the NSW Government's 2020 administrator's report. The recovery period prioritised financial controls and service restoration, leaving digital infrastructure improvements lower on the priority list. The image duplication issue is, in that sense, a legacy symptom of years of deferred investment in back-end systems.

Exactly how many duplicate files exist across council's systems has not been publicly confirmed. What is known is that the Gosford CBD renewal project alone — spanning sites from Donnison Street in the north to the Kibble Park precinct near the waterfront — has generated project photography, drone footage stills and planning maps at a volume that outpaced any single document management protocol the council had in place.

What Other Councils Are Doing Differently

The gap between the Central Coast's current position and best practice elsewhere is measurable. Parramatta City Council, which has managed a comparable volume of CBD transformation imagery through its various Parramatta Square and river foreshore projects, adopted a centralised digital asset management platform in 2023 that uses perceptual hashing — a technique that identifies visually similar images even when file names differ — to flag duplicates before they are saved. The City of Bordeaux in France implemented a similar system ahead of its major waterfront renewal, with city planners citing reduced approval bottlenecks as a direct outcome.

For Central Coast, the practical path forward involves three steps that digital governance bodies consistently recommend: a full file inventory across all departmental drives, the adoption of a single naming taxonomy applied retroactively, and the deployment of automated deduplication software before any new tranche of Gosford renewal imagery enters the system. The council's ICT team, based at its Wyong administration centre, has not publicly confirmed a timeline, but the audit process is understood to be underway ahead of the next major planning documentation release tied to the Gosford waterfront master plan.

Residents and developers lodging applications through the council's online portal at Gosford and Wyong service centres should, for now, verify that any image attachments reference the current document version number and approval date — a precaution that reduces the risk of assessors working from superseded files. The broader fix, if Central Coast follows the trajectory of Malmö and Hamilton, is likely two to three years away from full implementation. That is, of course, contingent on budget allocation in a council still managing post-administration financial discipline.