Re-Import attachments into media library after migrating

Hey Deborah, just wanted to chime in with “Good Luck,” and continuing thanks to chezpaul.

The WP peeps do so much great work that you feel like a jerk to complain about anything, but if the Importer 0.6 is as iffy as it seems like it is to me, that’s really kind of shocking. Or if it’s not, I’d sure love to know how to use it “properly.”

The weird thing to me is that peeps must move blogs somewhat often, and some of those must be large… how do they do it? If you have 10 posts you can fix everything by hand and not think twice about it… but if you have 1,000 you need a pretty decent importer… ?

Best Wishes! ??

Deborah, the version I had Paul testing can be downloaded from a development branch here. It uses a newer version of the Posterous service that’s better than the older version. It also does a better job of handling some error conditions than the released plugin.

I had also worked with Paul to do some stuff with e.g. video, which the Posterous importer can’t natively handle (because it can’t make assumptions about what video plugins people may have, etc.). If you have mostly (or only) images, the beta importer will hopefully be a step up.

We deferred releasing it because we wanted to test it out on WordPress.com for a while first. Some more instances of testing on .org sites will boost confidence as well.

As for other export/import issues from WordPress.com, it’ll be best to open support tickets at https://support.wordpress.com/. There’s a pretty good chance those’ll filter down to me, but it’s best to go through proper channels in case I get hit by a bus, so that somebody else can pick up the work. ??

Oh, one more thing: It’s always good to test beta things on beta blogs if possible.

Haha, so I found the wrong Daryl… ??

Hey here’s my quick little tutorial for what it’s worth:

First of all, thank you Daryll from Automattic (makers of WordPress) for doing all the changes on the posterous importer and the work on the posterous media plugin.
Without him, this solution would not exist.

Using this method with the plugins we propose will allow you to transfer all your files (images, videos and audio files) and your comments. All images will be transferred at their highest resolution. There is only one little hiccup to all this.
Because of how the posterous API works, some of the images are rotated. You will then need to go into each post with rotated images and rotate them back to normal. The alternative would be to have lower resolution pictures in every post which wasn’t good enough for me.

So, what you need:

1. A posterous site

2. A hosted www.ads-software.com site

3. A Theme
I used a free wordpress theme called Stumblr.
https://www.eleventhemes.com/stumblr-theme/
It has the look and feel of a posterous blog but there are lots of other great wordpress blogging themes out there.

4. Download and upload the “Viper’s Video Quicktags” wordpress plugin to wp-content/plugins. Which allows to view mov video files in wordpress.
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/

5. Download and upload the “Jetpack” wordpress plugin to wp-content/plugins.
Which allows to view audio files in wordpress.
https://jetpack.me/

6. Download and upload the “GPP Slideshow” wordpress plugin to wp-content/plugins.
Which will allow to view your pictures just like in posterous with almost the same slideshow.
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/gpp-slideshow/

7. Download and upload the new beta “Posterous importer” wordpress plugin to wp-content/plugins.

8. Download and upload the “Posterous media” wordpress plugin to wp-content/plugins.

9. Login to your hosted site and activate these plugins: GPP Slideshow, Jetpack, Posterous importer, Posterous Importer Media Shortcodes and Viper’s Video Quicktags.

10. Click on Options for GPP Slideshow and set a Slidshow Display Time of 100000.

Also check the Slideshow on all pages checkmark. Save Changes.
It will tell you that you need to Update Permalinks Now. Click on that button. I set my Permalinks to Post name type the Save Changes.

11. In order to allow the Gallery Slideshow on your index page you need to do a little hack.
Open the file wp-content/plugins/gpp-slideshow/css/style.css and add this code at the end of it.

/* index page fix */
.flexslider {float: left;}
.flexslider li, .flexslider ul {padding:0px !important;}
.flexslider .slides li .flex-caption {padding:10px 4px !important;}
.slides, .flex-control-nav, .flexslider .flex-direction-nav {margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important;}

12. In order to have the thumbnails show by default open the “wp-content/plugins/gpp-slideshow/gpp_functions.php” file and change the two instances of this line:
?????echo ‘<ul class=”gpp_slideshow_thumbnails” style=”display:none”>’,”\n”;
to this
?????echo ‘<ul class=”gpp_slideshow_thumbnails” style=”display:block”>’,”\n”;

13. Do the import!

The import might take a while. Let it do it’s thing. Sometimes it won’t go all the way. I learned to just walk away from my computer and let it do it’s thing. I must have re imported my posterous site at least 40 times and maybe 4 or 5 times it didn’t go all the way to the end.

Now a few things you need to know.
Once you do the import, some of your pictures will be sideways or even upside down. This is just the way it is. Daryl says there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s just the way posterous handled pictures.

Another thing that the importer will not do is size properly all the iPhone vertical movies if you have any of these. So you need to go in manually on each post with these.

Something else to figure out before you launch the importer is what size you want your movies to be. I used 580 by 326 just because it looked right in my theme but you can use something else. I was just going for the posterous look. You can edit those settings in the posterous media.php file before you do the import.

Another thing that Daryl might need to fix but we never got around it was that all my posts with movies in them have a [gallery] short code attached to them. I had to manually deleted them all.

I didn’t have any tags or categories in posterous so I had to add all those manually too.

I hope this helps.

I’m very happy with the import.

Much less happy with the speed of wordpress. It’s the slowest kind of environment I’ve ever worked with. You have to jump through hoops to get your site to load in less than 4 seconds. It’s crazy.
For example, just by turning off the jetpack plugin, my site started loading 5 seconds faster. Yes 5…. So I’m in the search for another audio plugin that will work with the audio short code.

I’m sure I forgot a lot but this is the basics of the import.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I had problems dealing with all new movies imported from my now iPhone 5.
I decided to go with html5 and for some reason that only works well in Safari, otherwise the movies are upside down.
One more thing. GPP Slideshow works great in browsers but on iOS, it will only work if there’s one instance of it on the page.
So it’ll work great on a single post with a single instance of GPP Slideshow but on the main index page with maybe sometimes 3 or 4 slideshows it will not work. You’ll only see the first picture.

Okay, I’m done.

Thanks for that, Paul. The Jetpack plugin definitely shouldn’t slow your site down that much (if at all)! If you’re still having load issues, look up WP Super Cache in the plugin directory. It’ll cache your site for users who aren’t logged in, making it run much faster. (There are other caching plugins as well, but Super Cache is fairly simple by comparison and is authored by another Automattic employee, so I have a degree of trust in it.)

Daryl, thanks you so much for the information and background. Appreciate the quick reply and pointer to the Posterous beta plugin. I’ll give it a go this weekend.

My posts are mostly images, with a few videos, which I’ll probably do by hand.

Paul, thank you for posting your instructions for the plugin and the need to install the three additional plugins to support audio, video, and slideshows. Good to know ahead of time about the issue with the rotated images.

Again, my thanks to both of you.

@chezpaul: Can you point me to the Posterous media plugin? I don’t see it in the WordPress plugin repository.

That’s a Daryl question. He built it.
He would send them to me directly.

Whoa, that was fast. Thanks Paul. I’ll follow up with Daryl.

Daryl, beleive me, I”ve been GT metrixing my site like crazy… with W3 with WP Super cache, without… with optimized DB, with out this or that plugin, etc…. allow compression or don’t.

I’ll get to a point where my site loads in under 4 seconds and then the next day it’s back down to 15 seconds. At this point I’ve given up.

My site is for registered family members only anyway..

I should add that if you guys want to keep the post by email function of posterous, you should use Postie and not the post by email in jetpack. It does not work. At least not for me. Whatever I send, it get’s bounced back. The postie plugin works fine and allows custom post

Thanks Paul. I don’t use the email function very often. Didn’t know the email in JetPack wasn’t working.

A follow up on your tutorial:

You may want to change Step 10 to: Select Galleries, then Options

An option for people needing to manage their tags after importing: use the Term Management Tool plugin. It allows you to merge terms, move terms from one taxonomy to another, and set parent terms.

You can download the plugin I had created for Paul here. Just put it in your plugins directory, do the import, and then you can deactivate or delete the plugin, as it’s used only during the import itself to rewrite post content.

This isn’t in the plugin repo because it’s pretty specific to this use case, by the way. Happy to make it available, though — it just didn’t seem a candidate for the official repo.

As always, make sure you try this with a test import before wrecking production data. ??

Thanks Daryl, appreciate the info. Just confirming, I’m copying the plugin directly into the plugins directory? It doesn’t need to be in a named folder?

Yep, that should work.