This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Import external attachments

Description

Makes local copies of all the linked images and pdfs in a post, adding them as gallery attachments.

Source & support:

https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/import-external-attachments

Credits

This plugin is based on the work done in the “Import External Images” plugin by MartyThornley.

https://github.com/MartyThornley

HTTPS support added by IvanDoomer:
https://github.com/IvanDoomer

PDF support added by bengreeley:
https://github.com/bengreeley

Most of the JavaScript was rewritten from the original plugin, to reduce the
number of global variables.

Installation

  1. Download the “Import external attachments” zip file.
  2. Extract the files to your WordPress plugins directory.
  3. Activate the plugin via the WordPress Plugins tab.

FAQ

How does this plugin work?

The plugin examines the HTML source of your post when you save it, inspecting each IMG tag, and processing them according to the options you have selected.

Under the default settings, it will find IMG tags with links to images on other web sites and copy those images to your web site, updating the IMG src to point to your copy.

PDF functionality was added by bengreeley.

Does it work with MultiSite?

Yes! It was developed and built (and is used everyday) at PhotographyBlogSites.com – a multisite install.

What if i don’t want to import images from a third party image hosting site?

You can make it ignore any domain you want on the settings page, in case you work with a CDN or photo hosting site and want to keep those images where they are.

Reviews

January 30, 2023
This worked for me in 2023. All I had to do was install Classic editor and make sure the post pages wern't using any third party page builders. To import the missing attachments, I then opened the edit page for each post one by one and followed the instructions in the right sidebar. Once done, simply uninstalled classic editor and this plugin. Awesome. Thank you.
Read all 25 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Import external attachments” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Changelog

1.5.12

  • Adds support for pages.
  • Adds support for .doc and .docx files.
  • Fixes security issue by not directly echoing $_GET['post'] but casting it to int.
  • Adds support for filenames with spaces in them (by removing the space from the exclusion in the regex).
  • Makes the regexes slightly easier to read by making them case insensitive.

1.5.11

Add .jpeg support.

1.5.9

Remove duplicate README.

1.5.8

Fix some typos.

1.5.7

Add GitHub link.

1.5.6

Fix naming.

1.5.5

Make import_images_start_time a function. Hopefully it works now. :^)

1.5.4

Make import_images_start_time globally accessible.

1.5.3

General cleanup.

1.5.1

Merged upstream pull requests from bengreeley and IvanDoomer and changed to ‘Import external attachments’.
Now supports PDFs and HTTPS!

1.3

Fixed case sensitivity, thanks to https://github.com/SidFerreira
Fixed duplicate EXTERNAL_IMAGES_DIR notice

1.1

Fixed title in readme.