Came through where other plugins fell short

I handled a migration from wp.com that ended up pulling in only some of the images. The Media Library was missing most of what should have been there. The images in the posts remained on the old server. They were loading, so without digging, nobody would notices those images were being remotely served until the old site was shut down. I had the uploads files themselves, but now I had to at least link to those on the new server. I disabled extra image processing (SmushIt) and worked the problem with plugins.

I tried Auto Upload Images plugin, and it worked somewhat. It captured some of those remote images and pulled them in. Helpful, but incomplete. Those it captured did end up in the Media Library, so yay for that. Without a log, though, I don’t know what worked and what didn’t.

For the rest, I figured I had to just change the URLs in the post content. I used Better Search Replace, and it caught a lot more references, but again missed many. I could not detect a pattern though. It was not timing out. It was just missing references in the Posts table. And it was finding references in other tables, including the options table. I went directly into the SQL table to investigate, but couldn’t find what it was seeing. I was using the free version of Better Search Replace, so I didn’t have any logs to refer to.

Because this is such a common problem in migrations using Export/Import, I kept looking for a plugin, and that’s when I saw Go Live Update URLs. I thought what the heck. And this plugin found what was not found by these other plugins. All of my img links to the old server are now pointing to the new site. Many images still exist only in the filesystem, not in the Media Library. But I can live with that.

This plugin is now my first go-to next time I encounter this.

As to why the other plugins and even direct queries to the database missed what this plugin found, I figure I must have done something wrong. Not escaping characters or something.