Townsville Council Moves to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing City's Digital Records This WeekUpdated

Townsville City Council confirmed this week it has launched a formal review of its digital asset management system after duplicate and incorrectly tagged images were identified across multiple public-facing databases, including the council's property search portal and its infrastructure maintenance register. The problem surfaced publicly on Monday, June 30, when businesses along Flinders Street reported receiving planning documents containing photographs of entirely different properties — in some cases, sites located more than 20 kilometres away in Bohle and the industrial estates near the Port of Townsville.

The timing matters. Council is midway through a $4.2 million upgrade of its digital records platform — a project that was already under scrutiny following delays to the broader smart-city infrastructure roll-out tied to Townsville's hydrogen hub ambitions. Any errors embedded in the digital asset library now risk flowing into the new system when migration begins in September 2026, potentially compounding the problem at scale.

Where the Problem Has Hit Hardest

The duplication issue appears concentrated in two areas of council's database. The first is the planning and development register, which covers applications lodged through the Townsville City Council Development.i portal. The second is the maintenance log used by council crews managing drainage and road infrastructure — a system that feeds directly into flood resilience planning, still a live priority since the catastrophic 2019 floods inundated more than 3,000 properties across suburbs including Rosslea, Mundingburra, and Hermit Park.

Property professionals working near the intersection of Ogden Street and Stanley Street in the CBD flagged at least seven affected development application files to council between June 28 and July 2. In each case, site photographs attached to the files either matched a different address entirely or appeared more than once under separate property IDs. A conveyancer operating out of Sturt Street confirmed the error had slowed at least two settlements scheduled for late June, though the conveyancer declined to be named ahead of discussions with affected clients.

The council's GIS and Spatial Services team — based at the Thuringowa Drive administrative offices in Kirwan — has been tasked with running a line-by-line comparison of image metadata against property records. Council's publicly available digital transformation roadmap, published in March 2026, identifies the records migration as one of 14 priority projects in the current financial year.

What the Audit Involves and What Comes Next

The audit is expected to take approximately three weeks. Council's internal project documents, tabled at the June 25 ordinary council meeting, set a deadline of July 25 for an initial reconciliation report. That report will be presented to the Infrastructure and Operations standing committee before going to the full council in August.

For residents and businesses currently in the middle of development applications or property transactions, council's customer service centre at 103 Walker Street is the recommended first point of contact. Staff there can request manual verification of any file flagged as potentially affected — a process the council says should take no longer than five business days per file.

The James Cook University Geography and Spatial Sciences department, which has a formal data-sharing agreement with council dating to 2022, is understood to have been informally consulted about the best methodology for large-scale image deduplication. JCU's involvement has not been formally confirmed by either party.

Longer term, the incident has added weight to calls from local industry groups — including those connected to the Townsville Enterprise business advocacy network — for council to adopt open metadata standards before completing the September platform migration. Getting that right before the transfer matters more than hitting the deadline. Any images that carry incorrect tags into the new system will be significantly harder to correct once the old database is retired and backup access becomes restricted.