Cairns Regional Council confirmed this week that an internal audit of its digital media holdings identified more than 400 duplicate or near-identical images stored across at least three separate content management systems, creating administrative bottlenecks that have delayed the publication of updated materials for several council programs. The review, completed by the council's communications and records management team, began in late June and wrapped up on Thursday.
The timing matters. Council is currently refreshing public-facing materials tied to two active programs — the Esplanade Foreshore Activation Project and the Mulgrave Road corridor upgrade consultation — and duplicate files lodged under inconsistent naming conventions have made it harder for staff to confirm which versions are current. A backlog of unprocessed imagery from community events dating back to at least early 2025 was also found sitting in shared drives on the council's internal network.
What the Audit Found Along the Waterfront and Beyond
The problem is not unique to one department. According to council's published agenda papers for its June 25 ordinary meeting, the records management unit flagged digital asset governance as a standing operational issue, noting that multiple teams — including planning, tourism liaison, and community engagement — had been uploading event photography to overlapping storage locations without a centralised tagging protocol. The Tanks Arts Centre on Collins Avenue and the Cairns Convention Centre on Wharf Street were both cited in internal documentation as venues whose event photography had accumulated the highest volume of untagged duplicates over the past 18 months.
Staff from the First Nations liaison office, which coordinates material for the Queensland treaty process consultation sessions held periodically in Cairns, flagged separately that several culturally significant images used in community engagement documents had been incorrectly labelled or duplicated, raising concerns about the integrity of records tied to those consultations. Council's records team has been asked to prioritise that subset of the library.
The broader issue connects to a push across Far North Queensland local governments to digitise and standardise archival holdings. Cairns Regional Council adopted a Digital Information Management Policy in 2023 that required all departments to migrate to a single asset management platform by mid-2025. That deadline passed without full compliance across all units, which is part of why the duplication problem compounded through last year.
Practical Steps Now Underway
Council's IT services unit, based at the Spence Street administration building, began running deduplication software across the primary media library on Wednesday. Staff have been instructed to hold off uploading new photography until a cleaned file structure is signed off, a process expected to take another two to three weeks. A revised naming convention guide — mandatory for all departments — is scheduled for distribution before the end of July.
For community organisations that regularly receive image assets from council for use in newsletters or grant applications, the practical advice is to contact the council's communications team directly at the Abbott Street civic offices before using any imagery downloaded from the council website in the past six months. Some files currently publicly accessible may be superseded versions that have not yet been removed from the live content library.
The Cairns & District Historical Society, which has a longstanding arrangement with council to share digitised heritage photography, said through its public Facebook page this week that it had not been affected by the duplication issue, as its holdings are managed through a separate archival system hosted independently of council infrastructure.
Council's next ordinary meeting is scheduled for July 23, where the records management unit is expected to provide a progress update. A formal report on the digital asset audit, including a timeline for full compliance with the 2023 policy, is expected to be tabled at that session.