moving existing blog and at utter loss of direction

I have been messing around for three day(much of it in frustrated tears) trying to export my wordpress.com blog over to self-hosted wordpress. I have not been able to (1)import media library(all my 700 pictures that are embedded/attached in my posts), (2) use search and replace to change all existing links,(or anything else for that matter), src=”https://hopefullyhomemade.files.wordpress.com, to something like src=”https://hopefullyhomemade.files.com because my posts are now named https://hopefullyhomemade.com/?p=1527.

I gave up on someone answering my questions about the media because the old threads I found that describe my problem are marked resolved but do not help, and no one seems to know what to do. I resolved to the fact that I wasted hours trying to find the answer when I could be reuploading all my media from my harddrive and using search and replace to point all my pictures to the newly uploaded media library.

I wanted to try search and replace before I spent hours uploading pictures, but now I can’t even replace any of my links that point back to the blog itself. My internal links from one blog post to another blog post points off the new self hosted site and back to the old wordpress.com post.

I guess my question is: Do I waste anymore time trying to workaround wordpress’s epic fail to easily move my blog off wordpress.com or do I give in and manually upload and reinsert ever picture and manually relink every link throughout my whole blog? I just want to move forward. I feel like I am stalled and have nowhere to find help for this situation.