EDIT: This plugin has fallen out of maintenance, and I can no longer recommend its use. I haven’t found a substitute as yet. If you know of one, please let me know.
I’d been using my website at tylertork.com to talk about both my fiction and website-development stuff. When I decided to move the techie material to its own website (this one) , I needed to copy over some content, including a lot of articles with lots of screenshot images.
When editing a post or page, copy/paste of rich content works well — I was able to copy whole posts to the clipboard from the old site, paste them into a post I was editing on the new site, and Bob’s your uncle. Only problem is, what I’m really pasting is HTML data, which when it includes an image, references that image by its URL, so the posts on the new site were pointing to images on the old site. For purposes of backup, ease of editing, and better organization, it’s better to have all the content in one place.
To help with this, I used the plugin Auto Upload Images by . Thanks, Ali! If you create or edit a page while this plugin is active, it finds all the places your HTML references an image on another site, and copies that image to your own site, updating the reference also. Now all those images are in your own media library and can be deleted from the original site (if you like). It’s super slick — it just works, which is a mark of the best plugins.
You need to install the plugin before you paste the content, for it to work. If you already have images linked to other sites, here’s another article explaining how to fix that after the fact.