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

Central Coast Council is quietly working through a backlog of duplicated and outdated imagery embedded across its planning portal, heritage registers and development application databases — a technical housekeeping task that has ballooned into a genuine governance issue for a council still rebuilding public trust after its 2020 administration.

The problem is more widespread than it sounds. Duplicate images — photos, aerial shots, site plans and scanned documents filed more than once under different reference numbers — inflate digital storage costs, slow search functions and, in some cases, attach the wrong property photo to an active DA. For a council handling thousands of applications a year across a geography stretching from Gosford CBD to Wyong, a single misidentified image on a planning record can delay approvals or mislead property buyers.

Why this matters right now

The timing is not coincidental. Sydney recorded its hottest June since 1859 this year, and the Bureau of Meteorology has flagged the Central Coast as one of the regions facing increased bushfire and flooding pressure. That means climate resilience mapping, updated flood overlays and new hazard imagery are being ingested into council systems at a faster rate than at any point in the past decade. When fresh aerial photography of Tuggerah Lakes foreshore or Narara Creek flood plains is uploaded alongside older conflicting images, duplicate records become more than a storage nuisance — they become a planning risk.

Central Coast Council's digital transformation program, which sits under the broader Enterprise Resource Planning overhaul that began following the return from administration in late 2021, has allocated resources to audit the property information system used by staff in the Gosford and Wyong administration centres. A council spokesperson confirmed in May 2026 that the audit of the development application image library was underway, though no completion date was provided publicly. The council's online DA tracker, accessible through its website, still shows occasional instances where multiple identical site photos appear under a single application reference — a visible symptom of the deeper cataloguing problem.

Gosford CBD, the subject of a long-running renewal strategy, is generating a disproportionate share of the new imagery load. Drone surveys, heritage assessments and updated streetscape photography for the Mann Street and Donnison Street precincts have added hundreds of new files to the system since 2023. The Central Coast Regional Development Corporation, which holds its own image and planning document repository for state-significant sites in the corridor, operates a separate database — meaning the same site can be photographed, filed and duplicated across two independent systems with no automatic deduplication link between them.

How other cities are handling it

Cities that have moved furthest on this issue share one common factor: they invested in deduplication middleware before, not after, a major data ingestion event. Newcastle City Council in the UK completed a full deduplication audit of its planning image library in 2023, cutting its stored planning imagery by roughly 34 percent, according to a published case study from the Local Government Association. Auckland Council, following its own post-amalgamation IT overhaul, embedded automated hash-checking — a process that flags identical image files regardless of filename — directly into its document lodgement portal by 2022. Applicants uploading a duplicate are now warned in real time before submission.

Closer to home, the City of Newcastle in NSW completed a similar integration with its TechnologyOne planning platform in the 2024–25 financial year, a move its IT team presented at the Local Government Professionals Australia NSW conference in March 2025. The Central Coast runs the same TechnologyOne platform, which means the technical pathway to similar automation already exists — it is a configuration question, not a rebuild.

For residents and developers lodging applications in suburbs like Woy Woy, Erina or Tuggerawong, the practical advice is straightforward: when uploading supporting images through the council's online portal, use consistent file naming that includes the property address and date, and avoid resubmitting files already included in an earlier version of the same application. Council planning staff have the ability to manually flag and remove duplicates on request, and the customer service centre on Hely Street, Wyong can direct queries to the relevant records team. The bigger fix — automated deduplication at the point of lodgement — is a council IT decision, and given the pace of climate-related data ingestion now hitting the system, the pressure to make it is growing.