New Blogger Importer Plugin Also Imports Image Files To WordPress

Jan 6, 2013

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Otto and a few of the Automattician’s at WordPress, have developed a new version of the Blogger importer plugin which imports images from Blogger to WordPress.

The plugin imports posts, images, comments, and categories (blogger tags) from a Blogger blog then migrates authors to WordPress users.

You’ll need a self hosted version of WordPress installed before you can install this plugin and import all your content from Blogger.

Before you import your content from Blogger to your new WordPress installation, you should also redirect your Blogger links to WordPress.

Items not imported

Pages
Themes

Lets test this plugin out and go through the process of importing Blogger content to WordPress.

Firstly, you may have seen the existing Blogger Importer plugin which is listed in the official WordPress repository.

Here’s some of the description which clearly states images will not be imported.

Items not imported (Old Plugin)

Pages
Images (the images will appear in your new blog but will link to the old blogspot or picassa web locations)

Back to the new plugin which does import images.

New Blogger Importer Plugin

Once you install the new plugin, you might want to check out the readme file.

= Prerequisites =

The importer connects your server to the blogger server to copy across the posts. For this to work you need to have connectivity from the server to the internet and also have at least one of the remote access protocols enabled, e.g. curl, streams or fsockopen. You can use the Core Control plugin to test if these are working correctly. The importer connects to Google over a secure connection so OpenSSL needs to be enabled on your server.

Note: I did install the Core Control plugin and also emailed Bluehost where my test domains are hosted to ask them to enable OpenSSL and Curl but didn’t need it as the plugin worked before these requests where completed.

Install The Core Control Plugin

Once you install Core Control, you’ll find some handy information about how to use the plugin here.

You may need to contact your web host to enable OpenSSL and Curl.

Note: take backup of your existing WordPress installation as well as your Blogger content before using a plugin which is in Beta.

Then its simply a matter of following the normal import steps:

Go to Tools > Import
Click on Blogger
Click Authorize
Click ‘Grant Access’
Click the ‘Import’ Magic button
Set Authors

Conclusion

Very useful plugin developed by some of the brightest WordPress minds at Automattic.

You’ll find your Blogger images are now imported and hosted in your WordPress Media Library rather than Blogger or Blogspots servers.

Example:

If you go into your text editor or Media Library, you’ll see the proof!!

[plugit]Download the plugin from the WordPress core trac. Thanks to all who Contributed to this very useful plugin: wordpressdotorg, Otto42, Workshopshed, SergeyBiryukov, rmccue.[/plugit]

Further Reading

Comments

6 responses to “New Blogger Importer Plugin Also Imports Image Files To WordPress”

Mat

May 25, 2013

Genius! This update (0.6) works very well …
Probe many plugins and scripts to migrate Blogger to WordPress, but the plugin worked well.
About all I had problematic, very well resolved images rising (by folder and date without accents and punctuation problems. Excellent!)

Tube to supplement with another Plugin, to mark the 1st image as Featured Images. Use “Media Tool” that makes this job very well.

Thank you!

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1. Brad Dalton
  
  May 26, 2013
  
  Hi Mat
  
  The guys who developed this plugin are some of the most experienced WordPress experts which is why the plugin is the best available for the job.
  
  Thanks for your comment.
  
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Andy from Workshopshed

January 22, 2013

Hi Brad,
The plugin you’ve linked to is still a work in progress. A this point in time there’s still a couple of issues with the image download that need resolving. There are also some issues if you try to re-import by resetting and re-loading. I’m working on fixing both those as I want to use the importer for my blog migration. I’d be happier if there were a few more people testing it too.
The file you’ve linked to will get updated so your readers should get the latest versions.
I would like to point out that I don’t actually work for Automattic, I’m just a WordPress user who wants to migrate posts and images from blogger. The other people listed helped out a lot moving from the 0.4 to 0.5 version but the image processing is mostly my own work with ideas taken from other plugins so I need to update the list of people who helped in the readme.
Apart from the issues mentioned above the other change in the pipeline is to sort out internal links. So for example if you’ve linked mysite.blogspot.com/2012/2/fantasticpost.html then that will get moved across to mynewsite.com/2012/2/fantasticpost.htm or whatever the post gets created as.
Cheers,
Andy

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1. Brad Dalton
  
  January 22, 2013
  
  Thanks for the update Andy.
  
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  1. Andy
    
    January 26, 2013
    
    Hi Brad, a new version posted late yesterday. Mostly UI change but also fixes 2 key issues, html files with image file extentions and avoiding duplicates when re-importing.
    Cheers,
    Andy
    
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    1. Brad Dalton
      
      February 1, 2013
      
      Thanks for the update Andy.
      
      Log in to Reply

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