Fatally Flawed — Dependent on Copyright Infringement

This is a decent plugin in that it essentially does what it claims to. Although the documentation was sketchy (almost nonexistent), it was easy enough to do the import. I downloaded a .zip file of my substack posts, then uploaded the same .zip file to my WP site from Tools > Import > Substack. The import was pretty quick — maybe 5 minutes at the most. I only started my substack 6 months ago so there wasn’t a lot of data.

Then bam! I had a whole bunch of new, published WP blog posts, with the original substack date. (For the most part, that is — there were some date/time issues when the original post was near midnight. I’m assuming that’s due to different server times.) They came in with my site’s styling, which was impressive. Footnotes were more or less there, but not exactly as footnotes; had I wanted to keep them, I would have had to do some cleanup.

My substack and blog are heavily dependent on images (I’m a photographer) and, although I could see the correct images in the imported posts, I couldn’t find them in the Media Library. I use each post’s Featured Image in several different ways and couldn’t figure out how to even find the images that I could see in my posts. So I tracked them down.

Turns out they are copies of my images and they live on an AWS server. I never gave the plugin permission to make copies of my images or to host them elsewhere. So that’s fatal flaw #1: I’ve completely lost control of my own images. They are on a server for which I have only Read permissions.

I’ve already alluded to fatal flaw #2: The images aren’t on my own server and therefore can’t be used as Featured Images in my posts. Fatal flaw #3 would be that when AWS goes down (as it did a few days ago), all of those images would be broken on my site.

I unpublished all the newly created posts and began replacing the images. So — aside from the fatal flaws mentioned above, it likely would have taken just as much time to create the posts manually.