Townsville Council Discovers Years of Duplicate Images Clogging WebsiteUpdated

Townsville City Council's digital asset library contains thousands of duplicate images — some files replicated more than a dozen times — after more than five years of inconsistent uploading practices across multiple council departments, according to a review of internal IT governance documents tabled at the June 2026 ordinary council meeting.

The problem matters now because the council is mid-way through a $2.1 million website redevelopment contract, awarded in late 2025, that is supposed to consolidate all public-facing digital content onto a new content management platform by the end of the 2026–27 financial year. Migrating a bloated, disorganised image library into that new system without first auditing it risks carrying the same disorder forward — wasting public money and producing a worse result than the one the project was designed to fix.

The roots of the duplication crisis trace back to the aftermath of the February 2019 floods, when council communications teams were handling an extraordinary volume of imagery — damage assessments, sandbagging operations along Flinders Street, recovery works at Riverway Drive and Aplins Weir — and uploading it rapidly with little time for consistent file naming or deduplication protocols. What began as an emergency workaround calcified into standard practice across teams managing tourism, infrastructure, and community services content.

A Backlog Built Across Multiple Departments

Between 2019 and early 2025, council's image library grew to hold more than 47,000 individual files, according to the governance review. Auditors found that roughly 30 percent of those files were either exact duplicates or near-duplicates — the same photograph saved under different file names, in different folders, sometimes at different resolutions. The Strand foreshore, the Castle Hill lookout, and the Strand Rockpool appeared among the most frequently duplicated subjects, reflecting their prominence in tourism and events promotion material produced by multiple internal teams working independently of one another.

Part of the structural problem was that council had no centralised digital asset management system before 2022. The Townsville City Libraries branch, Economic Development, and the Parks and Recreation division each maintained separate cloud storage folders with overlapping content and no shared taxonomy. When the council's ICT department attempted a partial consolidation in mid-2022, it merged folders without deduplicating them first, effectively compounding the problem.

The June 2026 governance documents note that the redevelopment contractor — whose name is not disclosed in the public-facing agenda — flagged the image library as a material risk to the project timeline during a scoping workshop held at the council chambers on Walker Street in March 2026. The contractor estimated that a thorough audit and deduplication process would add between eight and twelve weeks to the migration schedule if not completed before handover of the existing content repository.

The Fix, and What It Will Cost Ratepayers

Council's ICT team has proposed a two-stage remediation. The first stage, already underway as of July 2026, uses automated deduplication software to identify and flag identical files for deletion — a process expected to reduce total file count by at least 18,000 items within six weeks. The second stage requires human review of near-duplicates, a more time-consuming task that council has allocated 320 staff hours to complete before the October 2026 migration deadline.

The total cost of the remediation work, as estimated in the June agenda documents, is $84,000 — a figure that includes software licensing, contractor support hours, and internal staff time costed at the relevant award rates. That sum comes on top of the original $2.1 million contract and will be drawn from the council's existing ICT operational budget rather than requiring a supplementary appropriation.

For Townsville residents and businesses that rely on the council website for permit applications, flood map access, and event information, the practical upshot is straightforward: the new website will not launch on its original September 2026 target date. Council's project update, published on its website on 30 June, confirmed a revised go-live window of late November to December 2026. Anyone with time-sensitive council business in the intervening months is advised to use the existing site, contact the customer service centre on Sturt Street directly, or lodge queries through the MyTownsville app, which is running on a separate and unaffected system.