Perth Councils and Agencies Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Hitting Planning Portals This Week

Perth's planning and property administration systems hit a rough patch this week after a duplicate image replacement problem surfaced across several local government digital portals, delaying development applications in some of the city's busiest growth areas. The fault — which caused uploaded site photographs and architectural plans to overwrite one another when multiple files shared identical filenames — emerged in late June and has been confirmed as an ongoing operational issue by at least two metropolitan councils.

The timing is particularly awkward. Western Australia's construction pipeline is under intense pressure: Metronet corridor suburbs such as Ellenbrook and Morley are processing record volumes of medium-density applications, and the state government's housing demand surge, driven partly by immigration and AUKUS-related workforce arrivals near Stirling Naval Base, has pushed submission numbers to levels some council IT systems were not designed to handle. Any delay in the development assessment pipeline feeds directly into a supply bottleneck that Perth's property market can ill afford.

What Actually Went Wrong

The core problem is a naming-collision fault in document management software used to store and display images attached to planning applications. When two applicants — or a single applicant submitting multiple files — used identical image filenames such as "photo1.jpg" or "site_plan_final.pdf", the system silently replaced the earlier image with the later one rather than storing both separately. Administrators checking applications through the portal would then view the wrong photographs, in some cases misidentifying the site altogether.

The City of Stirling, which covers suburbs from Scarborough to Balcatta and processes some of the highest DA volumes in metropolitan Perth, confirmed it had identified affected records and was conducting a case-by-case audit of applications lodged between 1 May and 27 June 2026. The City of Wanneroo, which administers rapidly developing areas including Alkimos and Yanchep along the Mitchell Freeway corridor, said its technical team had implemented a patch requiring unique system-generated filenames on upload — but applications already in the queue still need manual review.

The issue is not limited to local government. Landgate, the state agency responsible for Western Australia's land titles and property information, uses image-linked records across its Landgate portal and MyLandgate platform based in Midland. Landgate has not publicly confirmed whether its systems are affected, and The Daily Perth was unable to obtain a statement by deadline. Independent conveyancers and surveyors working out of offices along St Georges Terrace in the CBD said they were operating cautiously, double-checking every image attachment before lodgement this week.

Practical Impact and What Applicants Should Do Now

For anyone with a planning application currently sitting in a Perth council queue, the advice from property law firms along Hay Street Mall is straightforward: do not assume your submitted images are displaying correctly. Log back into your council's application portal, open each attached document, and verify visually that the correct image appears against the correct file description. If anything looks mismatched, contact the assessing officer directly rather than waiting for the council to catch it during assessment.

Architects and drafters at practices in Subiaco and Leederville said the safest immediate workaround was to rename every file with a project-specific prefix — a job number, address string, or date stamp — before uploading. That approach prevents the filename collision that triggers the duplication fault in the first place.

The broader question is how long full remediation will take. The City of Stirling's audit covers a period of roughly eight weeks of applications, a substantial body of work given that the council typically handles several hundred DA decisions per quarter. Applicants whose files are found to contain the error will be contacted for resubmission, which could add days or weeks to assessment timelines already stretched by staff workloads tied to the state's infrastructure boom.

WA's Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage oversees the broader Planning and Development Act framework but individual portal systems are managed by each local government. That fragmentation means there is no single patch or central fix — each council is solving the problem independently, at its own pace, with its own IT resources. For applicants caught in the middle, checking your own files right now is the fastest path to avoiding a longer wait on the other side.