Images missing after import from self hosted
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Hello,
I am trying to import the content from a self-hosted blog to WordPress.com. There are hundreds of posts from 2005 to 2021, so I had to break up the export files into smaller chunks so the importer could work with the data properly. I have now moved all of the posts, and when I look at the posts in the editor, I can see all of the images, but when I look at the posts on the public website, none of the images are being displayed.
From what I can tell from reading past articles in this forum, this is a problem that sometimes happens when importing, and it can’t be fixed by the user, but requires assistance from a staff member. I have added “modlook” as a tag to this post, as instructed. I hope I am doing this correctly!
Thank you for any help you can provide!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Thanks @shaneycrawford — thinks have changed quite a bit in the past few years on that front, but I’ll do some digging and see what we can find.
Would you also be willing to upload one of the export files directly as a .txt file to your media library, so we can figure out what went wrong?
https://wordpress.com/media -
Thanks, @supernovia. I tried to upload one of the export files as a .txt file to the media library, but it said “Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons.”
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OK. I did more digging in the meantime. It looks like the problem is that blog.alientimes.org was denying image requests and returning 403 errors.
Are you able to open that back up so we can try fixing things? If there’s a problem with the installation, we really just need to be able to get to the media section.
Please let us know when you’ve done that.
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Thank you for checking into that. There is a problem with the site (it was hacked), so the host company shut down access to it while we try to fix it. I can access the site on my end because access has been permitted from my IP address, but perhaps the exporter can’t?
Does that mean that if I ask the host company to open up access to the public, then run the exporter again, then run the importer again, it should work? And do I have to delete all of the content from the new WordPress.com site before I do that?
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I also have ftp access to the site, so I could transfer all of the files from /wp-content/uploads to somewhere. Would that help?
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I have asked the host company to open up the site for access. I will let you know when that is granted. Thank you!
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Hello @supernovia. The site is back online, and I just checked and I can now see the images on the new site. However, does this mean that the images are actually still hosted at the old site? I would like to delete the old site, but if I do that, will I lose all of the images in the new site?
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Hi there,
The site is back online, and I just checked and I can now see the images on the new site. However, does this mean that the images are actually still hosted at the old site?
For now, yes that is the case. However now that the site is unblocked I have manually set our image backfill script, which will attempt to import the images you have on blog.alientimes.org so that it is found instead in your media library on WordPress.com here: https://tsukublog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/upload.php
Due to the amount of content you have, I am assuming that there are quite a few images that need to be imported still. Can you give 24 hours for the import to finish, then once again block blog.alientimes.org?
After the image import is complete, you should still see images on your site even after blog.alientimes.org is blocked. If you block the site and notice that you have images missing still, please let us know where you are seeing that so we can double check.
Thanks!
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staff-totoro
Thank you so much! I really appreciate your help with this!
Best regards,
Shaney. -
I left the site for several days as there are, indeed, a huge number of images on this site. Then, yesterday, I put a redirect on the original site (with a wildcard) so that everything would forward to the new site. And then I waited to see if there were any images that could not be displayed. It seems that many of them are being displayed, and I can confirm now that there are many in the media library (740 MB), but not all of them have been transferred over.
For example, with the redirect on, this page does not show images on cellphones, which made me go in and check the source for the page, and I could see that the links for img src codes in this recent post still point to the original site.
I have removed the redirect now. Do I need to wait longer, or is there something else I can do to fix this problem?
For example, do I need to delete all of the data and do the import again now that the original site is no longer blocked? I would prefer not to do that, if at all possible, as there are 1746 posts in total over 88 pages, so it would take quite some time to go through and delete them all, I imagine, but if that is what I need to do, please let me know.
Thank you!
Shaney. -
Hi Shaney,
I’m trying another import for the image files from our end. Let’s again give it around 24 hours, then check if you still see images being loaded from the old site.
If that fails, we might need to empty your site completely, so you can import again from scratch. At that point I’d also recommend getting a completely new export from the old site.
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Hi @kokkieh,
The src for the photos on this page…
looks like this:
Does this mean the photos are still hosted at the original site (blog.alientimes.org)?
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Yeah, it sounds like the backfill still needs to keep working. And we may need to re-run it a few times — sometimes a host will stop us from grabbing so many images at once.
I’d recommend checking two things before redirecting the old site.
– Make sure the media libraries on both sites match up.
– Search your new site for posts with the old image urls (they’d show up in wp-content/uploads) to see how many are still affected.
For what it’s worth, if you’re having security problems on the old site, you could also redirect or deny access everything except images. It depends on how your host is set up, so your hosting company would likely need to help, but in my experience with LAMP setups, it would have looked something like this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6863162/htaccess-password-protect-directory-but-allow-image-file-types(Noting that isn’t a redirect, btw, but a deny like you had earlier)
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