Brisbane Councils and Developers Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Clogging Planning Portals This Week

Brisbane City Council's development assessment portal flagged more than 340 duplicate image files across active planning applications during the last week of June, triggering an emergency data-cleansing audit that is still running as of Saturday. The council's City Planning and Sustainability division confirmed the audit began on June 30, after applicants submitting documents through PD Online — the state's primary development lodgement platform — reported that site photos and architectural renders were duplicating on upload, inflating file sizes and, in some cases, causing submissions to time out entirely.

The timing is not ideal. With 2032 Olympic infrastructure approvals accelerating along the Inner City Bypass corridor and through the Woolloongabba precinct near the Gabba rebuild site, planning officers are processing an unusually heavy volume of development applications. Any delays in the assessment pipeline have downstream consequences for contractors and subcontractors already locked into tight programme schedules.

What Went Wrong — and Where It Showed Up First

The duplicate image problem appears to have originated in an update pushed to PD Online by the Department of Housing, Local Government, Planning and Public Works on June 24. That update was intended to increase maximum attachment sizes to accommodate the larger design packages now common in Olympic-related submissions. Instead, a caching error in the upload module caused certain image file types — specifically JPEG and PNG files over 8 megabytes — to write twice to the document repository.

Logan City Council, which is managing a significant development pipeline along the Chambers Flat Road and Park Ridge corridors south of the city, reported similar issues to its own digital lodgement system within 48 hours of Brisbane's. A Logan-based planning consultancy operating out of Beenleigh told its clients on July 1 to hold back any new lodgements involving photographic site surveys until further notice, citing uncertainty about whether submitted images were being correctly recorded as single files or as duplicates that would need manual removal.

Ipswich City Council, dealing with growing application volumes driven by population growth in the Springfield and Ripley Valley areas, issued a brief notice on its website on July 2 advising that its integration with PD Online was under review. No specific resolution date was given in that notice.

What Councils and State Agencies Are Doing Now

Brisbane City Council's audit team, working out of the council's 266 George Street headquarters, has been manually reviewing applications lodged between June 24 and July 2. Council's online portal showed 218 applications in a pending status as of Friday afternoon — a figure that is roughly double the typical Friday backlog, based on publicly available portal data from the same period in 2025.

The Department of Housing, Local Government, Planning and Public Works issued a technical advisory on July 3 confirming the caching error and advising local governments to suspend automated document processing for affected file types until a patched version of the upload module is deployed. The department indicated the patch would be released no later than July 7, though it noted that manual processing of already-lodged applications could continue in the interim.

For applicants with time-sensitive submissions — particularly those tied to early works approvals for the Woolloongabba and Hamilton precincts — council planning officers are reportedly prioritising manual workarounds, including asking applicants to re-submit affected images as PDF files bundled within the main application package rather than as standalone attachments.

Developers and consultants with applications currently sitting in the PD Online queue should check the portal's document status screen, confirm whether their image attachments are listed once or multiple times in the supporting documents register, and contact their assigned council assessment officer directly if duplicates appear. The council's Development Assessment team is reachable through the existing application reference number system; no new lodgement numbers are required for affected files. Anyone with a submission deadline falling before July 10 is advised to contact their local government assessment team before close of business Monday.