How do I ‘rebuild’ the WordPress Media library after transfer to new host?

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I recently inherited a large site from a developer that vanished. The site has more than 6,000 images. In the pages most of the images are missing, however, they are referenced in the media library and I can see them on the server under wp-content/uploads. When I try to access any of these images with the blank thumbnail I get the following error message:

Missing Attachment

Given that this site has been moved to a new host I am pretty sure that these images are not properly referenced but I am not sure how to modify the path to the images to get them to show up properly. I did some research and tried the following:

UPDATE wp_posts set post_content=REPLACE(post_content, 'mysitexyz.net.basepointsite.com/', 'mysitexyz.net/');

What is the correct way to re-associate these images and have them appear correctly in the media library?

1 Answer
1

There’s a few plugins to fix this, but basically it your database still references the images to be “oldsite.com/wp-content/uploads/” and you need it to be “newsite.com/wp-content/uploads”

So you have to change all old references. You could use SQL:

    UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, ‘http://www.oldsite.com’, ‘http://www.newsite.com’) WHERE option_name = ‘home’ OR option_name = ‘siteurl';
    UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, ‘http://www.oldsite.com’,’http://www.newsite.com’);
    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, ‘http://www.oldsite.com’, ‘http://www.newsite.com’);
    UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value, ‘http://www.oldsite.com’, ‘http://www.newsite.com’);

I used to use this plugin which worked great for transferring sites.

Velvet Blues Update URLs

And this plugin is specifically for letting you sync local and remote changes that have been made throuh ftp:

FTP Sync – Theme, Media & Plugin Files

Or here’s a few other popular ones, they pretty much do the same thing:

MPress Fix URL References
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mpress-fix-url-references/

Go Live Update URLS
https://wordpress.org/plugins/go-live-update-urls/screenshots/

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