Unsuccessful in migrating images to self-hosted WordPress site

  • Unknown's avatar
    whatkcdid · Member ·

    Hi everyone,

    I’m having major issues migrating my image library over to a self-hosted WordPress site (on bluehost).

    My sites are public, I’ve followed all the instructions and reached out to the Happiness Engineers who haven’t been able to help me either. I’ve basically been told that the only way I’m going to get it sorted is by paying for a guided transfer, which I really don’t want to do as I’ve already done the whole thing myself — just need them tell me what is going wrong with this one bit.

    So I’ve got over 1,600 images in my WordPress.com media library and only 700 of them are showing up in my self-hosted library. In order to get this far (at first only about 100 were showing up) I’ve had to do multiple exports of just the media library (in one month increments) and import the xml files into WordPress.org one at a time. I obviously can’t go any smaller in the increments and I know there are loads of images that are missing.

    Another weird thing is that in my WordPress.com image library, nearly every single image is attached to a post, but when I look in my self-hosted site’s library, over 500 are listed as unattached to a post!

    If I’d known it was going to cause me this much trouble at the beginning I’d have just paid for a guided transfer, but I’m reluctant to do it at this stage. Feel like I’m in being held ransom a bit.

    Has anyone had experience with this? Would love to hear any advice. I really do not want to have to download individual images and reupload them into blog posts.

    Thanks!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    themagicrobot · Member ·

    I’m afraid I have no answers. I only post here to advise you to change the tag from “modlock” to “modlook” to get a response from staff. Images are always an issue with import/export, (especially 1600 of them over five years……If you don’t want to go down the Guided Transfer route then I would just keep trying a month at a time) hence the WordPress.com disclaimer in the support doc https://en.support.wordpress.com/export/ :

    Note: This will ONLY export your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags; uploads and images may need to be manually transferred to the new blog.

  • Unknown's avatar
    billh93 · Member ·

    Hello whatkcdid,

    I’m sorry for your troubles as moving your site to another provider is no easy task. If you haven’t already you can view Bluehosts migrating tutorial for WordPress.

    I would also suggest to contact Bluehost support as they can guide you on how to migrate your wordpress site over to them. If you feel like doing it all on your own if you have no other choice.

    I would suggest following this articleto look at your wordpress error logs and see what is causing the issues you are having.

    I hope this helps!

    Best,
    Bill

  • Unknown's avatar
    gemmacevans · Member ·

    Hi whatkcdid,

    I’ve followed all the instructions and reached out to the Happiness Engineers who haven’t been able to help me either

    I can see you have also contacted us by email. A member of staff replied to you on Wednesday with some more information about the export process, including the possibility of Guided Transfer.

    To look into this further, I generated an export file only containing media. I then imported the .xml files into a test site. All 4.7GB of media imported successfully, which suggests the export file is working as it should. As @billh93 suggested, you may want to try contacting Bluehost to see if they are able to see any issues on their end.

    I’m going to close this thread so all your support stays in one place, but you’re welcome to reply to our email so we can answer your questions there.

    Thanks!

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