One of the problems found in making a local archival backup of your free WordPress.com blog is that users are not allowed to bulk export their images and other uploaded files. Just the archive .xml file, which has all the HTML of the blog posts inside it. WordPress.com unhelpfully suggest: “uploads and images may need to be manually transferred to the new blog”. That’s possible for the lazy blogger who only ever squeezed out six posts before exhausting their intellectual energies, but not so useful for uber-bloggers with thousands of posts and images.
For those who are self-hosting a WordPress install, archiving all images is a simple matter. Just copy over the relevant folder by FTP access. But for free WordPress.com users that’s not an option.
Similarly, those moving from a live WordPress.com blog to a new self-hosted WordPress blog are also in luck. Import the .xml backup of your blog and the new self-hosted WordPress install should go fetch the old blog’s live images and import them, even reworking all their links to conform to the new site URL. Once everything has been ported across, the old WordPress.com blog can then be deleted.
However, there may be instances where someone wants to make a more long-term local archive of a free WordPress.com blog, especially one that is set to be deleted. A literary executor, for instance, may want to properly archive then close a writer’s substantial blog. Perhaps there are legal problems with the estate that means the blog needs to come down. Perhaps they intend to publish it in book form or online again at some time in the future, but… they’re not sure yet.
But they do know that they want the archive to remain more-or-less portable and flexible into the future. I’m assuming that that person doesn’t have time or the technical savvy to: buy web space; get to the host to activate the database on their website space; get a hosted WordPress install set up and configured with the database; then save the blog out from that. Or to set up a local MySQL etc install on their desktop, something which is dangerously unstable in terms of later moving it to a new PC or a fresh OS install.
In such a case the easiest option for doing this appears to be…
1. Download and install a website ripper (or in more polite parlance, “mirroring”) software. Such as the excellent free HTTrack Website Copier. Use its simple wizard to make a full local mirror of your blog. You’re only doing this to get at the images, and have them accurately mirrored inside their correctly named sub-folders.
Unfortunately the downloading of your target blog may take quite some time, even for a relatively small blog. A test run with JURN’s substantial blog took a ridiculous 90 minutes to mirror, using HTTrack 64bit Windows and standard broadband, including 18,000 “ooh, ooh, share this post on CrapUpon!” and similar WordPress fluff-files.
2. Then download an export backup .xml of your blog, from your blog’s own Dashboard (Dashboard | Tools | Export | Export | Complete | Download Export File). This export will be a text only .xml file, which won’t include any of the blog’s images. (What to do when the export email never arrives)
3. Copy out the images folder (look for a folder titled yourblogname.files.wordpress.com) from the local ‘mirror’ of your blog that HTTrack made. Place this below the location of your blog’s exported .xml file.
4. You now have a relatively clean and simple backup archival copy of your blog, with the folders of blog images aligned (in terms of everything but the base URL) with the URL references contained in the .xml archive file.
5. Make a copy of the blog’s main index.html page, so as to capture any sidebar blogroll links. Perhaps also take a screenshot, and also download the .zip of the template that was used by the blog. Place these items with the .xml and images folders.
6. Save and zip an archive of the blog .xml and and the blog images, plus the index.html, the template .zip, and the screenshot.
The advantage of doing it this way is that the blog is now much more portable across longer periods of time. If — five or ten years down the line, once the author’s estate has been sorted out — you want to put the blog online again, or port it into a book or timeline or whatever, you still have a single-file local .xml copy with code that’s fully accessible for search/replace with a simple text editor. You’d upload HTTrack’s folder(s) of the archived images somewhere, then tweak the archive’s .xml via search-and-place of the image links (perhaps by using the free Notepad++, which can cleanly handle and save huge .xml files without injecting them full of Microsoft Office bloat on saving), such that the .xml archive image links all point to your new online images folder. A new self-hosted WordPress install should then go fetch those images and import them, reworking all the links to conform to the new site URL.
Update, March 2019.
Via the new dashboard, “Export Media Library” newly added…
Update, September 2021. Easier method and better than HTTrack.
The following assumes i) your images were all give unique names at upload (i.e. not continually 1.jpg, 2.jpg., mycat.jpg, mydog.jpg etc); and ii) the exported .ZIP file containing your images never completes its download, ever. A very common occurrence. You are left with no way to get your images archived.
1. From the newer WordPress Dashboard (not the old one), download your .XML files containing posts and pages.
2. Copy them somewhere, rename as .HTML
3. Run them through Sobolsoft Extract Links from Multiple HTML files, or a similar link extractor.
4. Copy the resulting links list to the clipboard, paste to Excel.
5. Sort A-Z and delete all links that are not https:// yoursite. files.wordpress.com/ Note the “.files.” here. This is where the images live. Some older blogs will have both http and htpps links to images, which when sorted will appear at different sections of the list.
6. Copy out the resulting list to Notepad++ and ‘search-replace delete’ the ending slash. You will have…
https:// yoursite.files.wordpress.com /2021/10/yourimage.jpg/
And you want it without the trailing slash…
https:// yoursite.files.wordpress.com /2021/10/yourimage.jpg
7. Save the final list as list.txt This has all the links to your images.
8. Install the free DownThemAll! browser extension in your Web browser, or open it if you already have it.
9. Right-click on its download panel and choose “Load from List”. “Rename on duplicate”. It’s very robust and can handle 10,000+ links with no problem.
10. Start downloading. Getting all the images from a large ten-year blog may take many hours.
In an emergency you can then reinstall WordPress, install the .XML, the same template as before, and also install the Search Replace Regex plugin. FTP upload a folder to your server called oldimages with the images, and then use the plugin to replace the paths to the images so that they all read https:// my_new_blog /oldimages/yourimage.jpg Provided there are no or very few image name conflicts, the site should look and work as before.
One further problem may occur for some who have been hosting on rented server-space. You may have image links that look like this…
This will be because a WordPress install loves to fill your server space with utterly pointless multiply-resized copies of the images you upload. Renamed resized images. Sigh. So, even though you have successfully got the linked image.jpg back on your blog, you will not have the image-193×300.jpg which makes its initial appearance in your blog post. Thus you need to check if this is the case for you, before you begin. If this is this case then you will also need to ensure that step 3 (see above also captures the img scr links as well as the a href links to images.
Another problem with re-linking images is capitalisation. You blog may have links to…
840-north-michigan-c1929.jpg
… which is not the same as an image you might have archived locally as…
840-North-Michigan-c1929.jpg
To re-name all image paths in the .XML, using Notepad++, to a static directory this is what you do…
Notepad++ sees the d bit as ‘any date number’.
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