Stolen Snapshots: Central Coast Residents Speak Out After Their Photos Are Used Without Permission Online

Julie runs a short-stay rental property on The Esplanade in Terrigal. Last month she found photographs of her lounge room, her deck and her garden, images she had paid a Gosford-based photographer to shoot in 2024, appearing on a rival listing platform she had never signed up to. Nobody asked. Nobody paid. The photos were simply there, attached to a different address.

She is not alone. Across the Central Coast, a growing number of residents, landlords and small operators say they have discovered their images duplicated and repurposed without consent, often through automated scraping tools that pull pictures from real estate portals, social media accounts and tourism websites. The problem sits at the intersection of intellectual property law, platform accountability and the practical realities faced by people who lack the resources to pursue legal remedies.

The issue has sharpened this winter partly because of broader conversations about digital rights playing out in state politics, NSW Premier Chris Minns acknowledged this week that his government faces serious headwinds heading into the next election cycle, but on the Central Coast the grievance is more immediate and more personal. People here are not debating policy abstractions. They are filing takedown requests and not hearing back.

What Residents Are Experiencing

At the Gosford CBD end of the problem, several traders along Mann Street and Baker Street have reported finding interior photographs of their shopfronts and fit-outs reproduced on aggregator websites and, in at least two cases, on social media accounts purporting to advertise competing businesses. The Central Coast Business Chamber, based in Gosford, has fielded inquiries from members on the issue, though the scale of formal complaints lodged with any authority remains unclear because no single agency tracks this category of dispute at a regional level.

Property owners with listings on Domain or realestate.com.au have standard terms that nominally govern image use, but once photographs migrate beyond those platforms, into Facebook Marketplace posts, Airbnb-adjacent sites or local Facebook community groups, enforcement becomes the individual owner's problem. The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) gives photographers and commissioning parties specific rights, but pursuing those rights typically requires engaging a solicitor, which can cost upwards of $300 for an initial consultation alone.

Community members around Woy Woy and Umina Beach, two suburbs that have seen increased short-stay rental activity as Sydney commuters invest in coastal properties, describe a sense of helplessness. Takedown requests submitted to platforms based in the United States can take weeks to process, if they are processed at all. One Woy Woy resident who operates a holiday cottage described submitting three separate takedown notices over six weeks before the duplicated images were removed from a third-party aggregator site. That account is consistent with the experience others have described, though the specifics vary by platform.

What Remedies Actually Exist

The Australian Copyright Council, based in Sydney, publishes free guidance on how individuals can assert their rights when images are used without authorisation. For Central Coast residents, the nearest in-person legal aid services are through the Central Coast Community Legal Centre on Donnison Street in Gosford, which offers duty lawyer appointments and limited intellectual property advice through referral. The centre's hours and eligibility criteria are worth checking directly before assuming coverage.

Platform-level remedies are faster in theory than in practice. Both Meta and Google maintain formal copyright infringement reporting tools, and the Office of the eSafety Commissioner has jurisdiction over some categories of image misuse, particularly where the duplication is connected to harassment or impersonation. The eSafety Commissioner's office has noted a general uptick in image-related complaints nationally, though Central Coast-specific figures are not broken out in publicly available reporting.

For anyone who discovers their photographs have been duplicated and used commercially without consent, the practical sequence is: document what you find with screenshots and URLs, submit a formal takedown notice referencing the Copyright Act, and contact the Central Coast Community Legal Centre if the platform fails to respond within 14 days. It is a slow process. It should not have to be, but knowing the steps at least gives residents somewhere to start.