Cairns Regional Council is undertaking a systematic audit of its digital asset library after years of duplicate and mislabelled images appearing across council publications, planning documents and community engagement materials — a problem that has drawn repeated complaints from local organisations and, in at least one documented case, caused confusion during a cyclone preparedness campaign in the region's outer suburbs.
The issue didn't arrive overnight. It grew from a series of decisions made between roughly 2016 and 2022, when the council expanded its communications output rapidly — launching new social media channels, redesigning the cairns.qld.gov.au website, and producing a wave of materials tied to projects like the Cairns CBD Masterplan and the Esplanade Lagoon redevelopment upgrades. Each expansion added new staff, new contractors, and new image repositories that were never fully unified.
A Patchwork of Folders and No Central Register
The core problem, as council's own internal communications review acknowledged in late 2024, was the absence of a single digital asset management system. Images sourced from photographers hired for specific council projects — including shots taken along Sheridan Street, at the Cairns Aquarium precinct, and during First Nations cultural events in the Mossman Gorge area — were saved into departmental folders that weren't accessible across teams. When a staff member in, say, the water infrastructure division needed an aerial photograph of the Barron River catchment, they often took the path of least resistance: a Google image search or a duplicated file pulled from an old email chain.
The results compounded. The same photograph of the Cairns foreshore appeared in at least three separate council reports with different captions. A stock image sourced from a Queensland Government library was used in a Cairns-specific disaster resilience brochure distributed to households in Woree and Mooroobool — it depicted a flood event from South East Queensland, not the far north. When community members noticed the mismatch during the 2023 pre-wet-season preparedness push, complaints came through the council's customer service portal on Sheridan Street and via the Local Disaster Management Group's community liaison channels.
Local First Nations organisations were among the most vocal in flagging a related concern: photographs taken during community events, particularly around the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji country acknowledgements, were appearing in materials without proper cultural authorisation. The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, held annually at the Cairns Convention Centre on Wharf Street, had by 2023 established its own photography protocols. Council materials were not always consistent with those protocols, according to concerns raised through the fair's organising body.
What the Audit Is Actually Doing
The current remediation effort, which council began formally in the first quarter of 2026, involves cataloguing an estimated 14,000 digital image files held across seven separate departmental drives. A working group drawn from the communications, planning and community engagement branches is cross-referencing files against licensing records and photographer contracts dating to 2015. Images without clear provenance are being quarantined — meaning they cannot be used in new publications until they are cleared or replaced.
The process is expected to run through to at least October 2026, ahead of the next annual report production cycle. Council engaged a Townsville-based digital archiving firm to assist with the technical side of the audit, with the contract value understood to be in the range covered by the council's existing ICT services budget allocation rather than a separately tendered project.
For residents and community groups who regularly interact with council publications — whether that's the quarterly Cairns Regional Council community newsletter, environmental impact documents circulated around the Trinity Inlet, or materials produced under the Reef Guardian program — the practical upshot is that some older publications are now marked as under review on the council website. New materials are being produced with mandatory metadata tagging that records the photographer's name, the date of capture, the location and the licence type.
Community organisations wanting to flag a specific image they believe is misattributed or culturally inappropriate can contact the council's communications team through the customer service centre at 119–145 Spence Street. The audit working group is treating those referrals as priority items.
