Geelong Takes on the Digital Clutter Problem: How the City's Property Records Stack Up Against Global Peers

Thousands of duplicate photographs are clogging Geelong's municipal property and planning records, a problem that digital archivists and local government IT managers say costs councils measurable time and money every year, and one that cities from Gothenburg to Greater Manchester are now racing to fix. The City of Greater Geelong, which manages records across more than 280 square kilometres of urban and peri-urban land from Corio to Torquay, has been quietly working through its own remediation program since at least early 2025, according to council planning documents tabled at the Civic Precinct offices on Gheringhap Street.

The problem matters now because planning activity across the Barwon region has surged. The federal government's Geelong City Deal, a $370 million investment package signed in 2022, triggered a wave of development applications, each generating multiple site photographs, heritage assessments, and aerial captures. When those images are uploaded by different contractors across different stages of a project, duplicates accumulate. For records staff, searching a property file can mean wading through dozens of near-identical shots of the same Pakington Street shopfront or the same Norlane subdivision corner block.

What Geelong Is Actually Doing About It

Deakin University's Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, based at the Waurn Ponds campus on Pigdons Road, has been involved in developing image-deduplication tools for local government clients in Victoria. The institute's work uses perceptual hashing, a technique that identifies visually identical or near-identical images even when file names differ, to flag redundant records before they are permanently archived. The City of Greater Geelong has been among the Victorian councils exploring how such tools integrate with the state's Public Record Office Victoria standards, which govern how long planning images must be retained.

Nationally, the Local Government Professionals Australia body has flagged digital records management as one of the top five operational cost pressures facing mid-sized councils. Duplicate image remediation is not glamorous work, but the practical stakes are concrete: a council paying $80,000 a year for cloud storage can, in documented cases from comparable jurisdictions, reduce that bill by 15 to 30 percent through systematic deduplication, according to figures cited in a 2024 Local Government Victoria discussion paper on digital asset management.

How Geelong Compares With Cities of Similar Scale

Geelong's population sits at roughly 280,000, putting it in a bracket alongside cities like Townsville in Queensland, Launceston in Tasmania, and internationally, Malmö in Sweden and Dunedin in New Zealand, all mid-sized cities managing significant heritage and development record libraries without the resources of a capital. Malmö's municipal archive completed a deduplication project across its building permit image library in 2023, reducing its active image repository by an estimated 22 percent. Dunedin City Council adopted automated flagging tools in 2024 as part of a broader digital transformation programme tied to its Long Term Plan.

Geelong's position is complicated by the volume of images generated during the post-Ford transition period. After the Norlane and Corio manufacturing corridors were rezoned for mixed industry and residential use from 2017 onwards, heritage consultants, environmental auditors, and planning officers all photographed the same sites repeatedly across different assessment phases. Those images now sit across multiple systems, some held by the council's own Planning and Development directorate, others by contractors and by state agencies including the Victorian Planning Authority, which has a regional office in Geelong.

For residents and developers, the practical upshot is slower turnaround times on information requests. A planning history search for a property in, say, Armstrong Creek, the city's fastest-growing suburb, where more than 30,000 new residents are expected by 2040, can return image sets that have not been rationalised since the land was first subdivided. Council officers must then manually verify which images are current and which are redundant, adding hours to what should be a routine task.

The next step for Greater Geelong, based on council budget documents from the 2025-26 financial year, is a procurement process for dedicated digital asset management software. That process was expected to conclude in the third quarter of 2026. Councils watching the outcome include Surf Coast Shire, which faces similar pressures from rapid coastal development planning around Torquay and Jan Juc, and Moorabool Shire to the city's north. How Geelong lands that contract, and what it costs, will tell other regional Victorian councils plenty about whether automated deduplication is finally worth the investment.