Cairns Regional Council confirmed this week it is undertaking a structured audit of its internal digital asset management system after staff identified hundreds of duplicate image files spread across shared drives used by at least four separate departments. The review, which began on Monday 30 June, is expected to run through the end of July 2026.
The timing matters. Council is currently mid-way through a $1.4 million refresh of its public-facing website — a project managed out of the Spence Street civic building — and duplicate or incorrectly labelled images were being inadvertently pulled into new web pages and printed collateral. Assets depicting the wrong suburb, the wrong community group, or outdated infrastructure were showing up in materials intended to represent current council projects, including the Esplanade precinct upgrade and works near the Cairns Botanic Gardens at Edge Hill.
How the Problem Built Up
The issue is not unique to Cairns, but it has particular consequences here. Council departments covering tourism promotion, First Nations community liaison, disaster resilience communications and the reef water quality program each maintain separate repositories, and for years those libraries grew independently with no unified naming convention. A file showing Trinity Beach foreshore, for example, might be saved under five different filenames across as many folders, meaning search tools return redundant results and staff default to whichever version loads fastest.
The Cairns Local Disaster Management Group, which relies on council's communications infrastructure when activating public alerts during cyclone season, flagged the problem in a formal internal memo in March 2026. That memo — the existence of which was confirmed in council's published agenda papers from its April ordinary meeting — noted that image duplication was slowing the upload of real-time community bulletins to the council's public emergency portal during a drill exercise conducted in February.
The council's digital services team, based at the Cairns City Library on Abbott Street, is leading the deduplication project. The process involves running automated scripts to identify files with matching pixel signatures, then manually reviewing flagged pairs to determine which version holds the correct metadata — including the location tag, copyright clearance status and the date the photograph was taken.
What the Audit Found in Its First Week
By Thursday 3 July, the team had processed roughly 40 percent of the library, according to documentation tabled at this week's ordinary council meeting. Of the images reviewed so far, an estimated 2,300 files were flagged as duplicates or near-duplicates. Around 180 of those involved images of communities in the Yarrabah and Gordonvale areas that had been mislabelled during a bulk import carried out in late 2023, when council migrated files from an older server to its current cloud-based storage platform.
The mislabelling issue is the more sensitive finding. Images showing Yarrabah community events had in at least a handful of cases been used in publications referencing a different community entirely — an error that council's First Nations Community Partnership unit identified during routine content checks in May. Correcting those files is being treated as a priority ahead of the broader deduplication work.
Council has not publicly disclosed the total cost of the audit and remediation work, and The Daily Cairns was unable to confirm a final budget figure before deadline. The website refresh contract, awarded to a Brisbane-based digital agency in November 2025, is understood to include a content migration component, though the scope of that work and whether it covers the image library clean-up remains unclear from publicly available tender documents.
Residents and community groups who have supplied photography to council in the past — including images used in the Cairns Esplanade boardwalk redevelopment consultations — are being encouraged to contact the digital services team via the Abbott Street library branch if they want to confirm how their material is being stored and attributed. The audit is scheduled for completion by 31 July, with a summary report due to go before council in August.
