A couple of things to address

1. The images get imported correctly (somewhat), but all images (on most imports) have a “Link to media” href which points to the blogspot image on the blogspot image library..

This is a big problem right now, I’m willing to pay for the plugin, but right now can’t be used in production enviroments, its almost useless on reason above well descripted by npagazani.

You guys need to address the image url link while importing, as the previous version had no issues. Test with lastes WP version please.

Hi Nick, sorry this post was missed initially!

Those are both good points, and something we will look at updating soon. And yes the plugin will remain on the repo for free.

@wpusermv, as far as I’m aware we haven’t made any changes to the way image importing is handled. Are you sure it worked in a previous version?

Yes, cause is the first thing you check when the import is done. The images src and where it links just pointing or clicking the images in recently imported posts.

The image src its ok, but before it linked to the image/file url , and when clicking displaying a wpress gallery or slideshow , now it will only take you to the raw bp.blogspot image link.
Thus it is not a complete migration from blogger cause we still depend on those bp.blogspot iamges to stay up.

Check that many are complaining on this exact problem only from past weeks/months.

Maybe a function can solve the problem, but cannot get the solution , it needs grep all bp.blogspot href and replace by the new wordpress image file url.
Cannot be done a database level as I think there is no image url field, but when editing the post, there is visual popup when editing the image that lets you change to where the image link points.

So it can be implemented for a bulk action, but sadly I don’t have that much skills on php/wpress to make it myself.
Checked default_image_url , but does not works modifying existing posts,
also tried to set it before the import without success.

You guys are replacing the img src already at the import process , thus I think you can arrange this as it worked before.

Hope it can be solved, as think again, it’s not worth to migrate if you have thousand of images linking to an extenal blogspot file instead of the actual media file your plugin imported to wordpress local server.

Think that no one can use this plugin right now, as the new site its 100% linked to previous blogger images locations. manually changing thousand of pics is not possible.

Thanks for your concern.

@pipdig No worries. And for the record, to fix the broken permalinks after import I’ve been using this plugin.

The issue @wpusermv is mentioning has always been there. On some sites it worked ok, but on most it doesn’t, unfortunately. It’s not all that bad, as long as you don’t close your blogger account. Making it Private is ok. The images are imported to WordPress, at least the smaller versions, and are correctly linked to in the posts and pages (as src=). The issue is basically it comes in with a “link to” (or href) url which links to the full size image on blogspot’s CDN or image server.

To be honest, I believe the plugin works correctly, and the issue is how blogger links to full size versions of the images. The plugin couldn’t possibly know what’s a legitimate “link to”/href external image or other link vs a blogger one. Possibly with some crafty coding it could be modified to recognize what the blogger CDN or image server addresses are, and when it sees these, download the linked images instead, and insert those into the post instead.

Since a bulk removal of the “link to”/href isn’t really possible (that I’ve discovered anyways), another option would be to remove these during the import – if you could figure out which are legitimate vs blogger external links/images. The downside here is that you would only get the lower resolution image imported, which is the case now anyways – except with the added external image link.

I also tried running a few “Import External Images” plugins, but they don’t work since the links href links, and not external src links.

I do have another site to import later this week, so I’ll see if I can get examples and post them here if it happens on this one. I might also do some testing to see what can be done on the blogger site before import to help. I had tried turning off the lightbox setting in the past, but this didn’t help, and hence the reason I think it’s how blogger links to larger versions of the images shown in the posts and pages.

@npagazani So you agree that you are doing a partial migration, as you will always depend on blogger account and files to stay online.

That’s not a migration but a linked lifetime dependable cloning.

Sometimes work sometimes not? It worked in previous versions. Now its a repeteable error.

The plugin is great, but that iamge url aspect needs to be solved to work as intended.

Note again I would be willing to pay for a working plugin, so just trying to help here to improve it. Now is not suitable for a correct 100% effcient migration to WordPress.

If we leave blogger is for a reason, not to continue to be dependable on them.

@wpusermv I can see what you’re saying, but to be honest, pipdig have inherited these issues (yes, they were always there, including the image href issue) and it’s the only real option compared to the built in blogger importer. I’m sure in time they will address and fix these issues.

FWIW, I ran two test imports of the same site onto separate local WP installs to see which worked better. One site used the standard blogger importer, importing the xml file, and the other used this plugin.

Looking at the results, the built in blogger importer requires more clean-up and work than this plugin. For example, pages aren’t imported, only published/approved comments are imported, and worst of all, the importer created featured images out of PayPal button images (or other random images) on posts where there weren’t featured images.

For me, I would rather live with the image link pointing to blogspot and overcome the issue by using a lighbox to display the image (instead of it redirecting), and then pay someone on Upwork or Fiverr to manually fix them for me – while pipdig works on fixing the issue ??

But that’s just my 2 cents.

And BTW, I would not be willing to pay for this plugin since it has always been free (thanks to the open source WordPress community), and would hate to see it go that way, making it more difficult/expensive for people who want to migrate from Blogger to WordPress.

As it is, I’m not a fan of pipdig’s license they use on their themes, which seems to go against GNU/Open Source principals, and is not inline with the license agreements of the big theme players out there (Genesis, ElegantThemes, etc) that rely on the fact that WordPress IS open source and respect that, IMO. Just sayin’!