Geelong's Digital Image Problem: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

A quiet but costly problem has been building inside Geelong's planning and property systems. Duplicate digital images, some dating back to early mapping digitisation projects from the mid-2010s, are corrupting heritage registers, slowing development applications and creating headaches for property owners trying to sell or renovate. City of Greater Geelong officers are among those now pushing for a coordinated fix, and the conversation about who fixes it, and how fast, is growing louder.

The timing matters for practical reasons. Geelong is in the middle of one of the most intensive planning periods in its recent history. The federal government's Geelong City Deal, which has committed funding to major infrastructure and urban renewal projects, depends heavily on accurate spatial data, aerial photography and heritage records. When duplicate images sit unresolved in council's electronic document management systems, they create ambiguity about heritage overlays along precincts like Pakington Street in Geelong West or the Moorabool Street commercial corridor, ambiguity that can stall or complicate development approvals.

The Scale of the Backlog

Deakin University's Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, based at the Waurn Ponds campus, has been tracking the broader challenge of digital asset integrity across Victorian local government systems. Researchers there have noted that image duplication rates in planning document management systems can run as high as 30 per cent in councils that have undergone major software migrations without structured data audits. The City of Greater Geelong migrated to a new records management platform in stages between 2019 and 2022, a period that coincided with significant staffing pressures during the pandemic years.

Surf Coast Shire, which manages environmental planning across sensitive areas from Torquay to Lorne, faces a related but distinct version of the problem. Duplicate drone and satellite imagery acquired during coastal erosion monitoring programs has, in some cases, led to conflicting assessments of vegetation buffers and setback zones. Shire planning staff have been working with the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning to reconcile those records, though no formal resolution timeline has been publicly confirmed.

The Geelong Heritage Centre, located on Little Malop Street in the CBD, holds one of the region's most significant photographic collections, more than 80,000 items catalogued as of its most recent published inventory. Staff there have flagged that digitisation grants awarded through Creative Victoria have helped accelerate scanning programs, but duplicate file creation during batch processing remains an unresolved quality control issue across several local history collections in the region.

What Needs to Happen

Technology consultants working with Victorian councils have pointed to two standard remedies: automated deduplication tools applied at the point of ingest, and periodic manual audits tied to specific trigger events such as planning rezonings or heritage study updates. The second approach is more resource-intensive but catches the contextual errors that software alone misses, cases where two images are technically distinct files but show the same property at the same time from slightly different angles, each tagged with conflicting metadata.

For Geelong property owners, the practical advice is straightforward. Anyone lodging a planning permit application for properties within a heritage overlay, and there are several hundred such properties across the Newtown, Geelong West and East Geelong precincts, should request a records check from council's statutory planning team before submitting. A duplicate or outdated image on file can result in planners referencing incorrect site conditions, adding weeks to an assessment process that already averages around 60 days for straightforward applications under the Planning and Environment Act 1987.

The broader fix will require resourcing decisions at the council level, likely as part of the City of Greater Geelong's digital transformation program, which was flagged in the 2025-26 budget cycle as a priority area. How quickly that translates into dedicated image auditing capacity is the question facing both the council's information services team and the elected officials who will need to back the spending. Until then, the duplicates accumulate.