If you’ve been using Blogger and are moving to WordPress, you might notice that your Blogger-hosted images don’t show up consistently in your WordPress posts, even if you used absolute URLs for the images.
This is because Blogger prevents hotlinking after a few page loads - you may see the images initially, but they will be blocked after a few views.
Getting the images to your new server is not easy, because there is no simple list of the images that you can view and download from.
However, if you have shell access, you can get the images by using the Linux wget command as follows:
wget -e robots=off -E -H -p -Dphotos1.blogger.com,myblogspotblog.blogspot.com --random-wait -r -l inf http://myblogspotblog.blogspot.com
where myblogspotblog is the subdomain you used on Blogger, and photos1 is the blogger subdomain that hosts your images (this may be photos2 or something else for your account).
Run this command, then login to your site via FTP. Move the images to the /wp-content folder, perhaps within a subfolder such as /wp-content/blogger. Check a few URLs to make sure the images were moved as intended.
Next, you’ll need to update your image links to point to the new file locations. The easiest way to do this is to backup your MySQL database, save a copy, and do a find-and-replace in a text editor. TextPad is an excellent editor to use. Drop your database tables, import the modified SQL file, and you’re done.
There is also an easier-but-less-robust plugin that will move images from Blogger to your WordPress site. It does not remove images that are embedded but not linked.
Note: Most hosts will not do this for you. WebbleYou will - just ask when you sign up.
July 19th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
I would be happy to improve the image import plugin at http://notions.okuda.ca/wordpress-plugins/blogger-image-import if someone finds a problem with it or has a fix.
You are correct that it tries to restrict itself to the most obvious thumbnail+link images, and that restriction was put in place to keep from accidentally doing any harm (and all I needed at the time).
It could be made more forgiving for embedded-only or linked-only images if this is required. Please leave a comment on that page with any issues or suggestions.
July 31st, 2006 at 11:33 am
lol great tip, saved me lots of time messing with wget options
September 14th, 2006 at 12:26 am
[…] WGET the images from Blogger to your server. Hotlinking them from Blogger will not work - once they are viewed in an external page a few times, they will start to be blocked. […]
July 12th, 2007 at 4:29 am
[…] their images on Flickr or Photobucket. For the more Geeky you can check out this Plugin or this shell command to move your pictures to your own […]
October 26th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
There were a few issues I found when trying to run wget.
My goal is to have an archive on disk that where I can
access everything even if blogger.com goes away. With the wget incantation above, the URLs still refer to blogger/blogspot.com sites. To resolve this, I needed to add the “-k” flag to convert URLs to pointers to the local files. Then the tricky part… I needed to search through the source of my blog’s web page to find all the different photo server names to add to the command line. I ended up with this:
D:\veronica_blog_archive\full2>wget -e robots=off -E -H -p
-Dbp0.blogger.com,bp1.blogger.com,bp2.blogger.com,
bp3.blogger.com,YOUR_BLOG.blogspot.com –random-wait
-r -k -l inf http://YOUR_BLOG.blogspot.com
and it seemed to work.
Now I can just zip up the dir where wget plopped all the
files and subdirectories and I have a savable archive.