Hi guys,
I am in the process of shifting my hosting etc..
I have copied the uploads folder and have pasted in the right place. I am able to see the internal images within the articles without any problem. The problem is I am not able to find the Featured Images, can you help me?
Thanks.
Copying and pasting files is necessary but not enough to move a WP install.
WP is not just a bunch of files, as you might know. It’s a bunch of files organized by a database. In order to properly move your site, you need to find your database in your current host’s control panel, export all tables, create a new database on the new host, and import again, and then make sure wp-config.php is set to find the new one.
If you don’t know how to do this, someone here can probably walk you through it, but the first step might be to contact your hosting provider – old and/or new – and let them know you want to move a WP install. There are also many tutorials out there, including the official WP docs, but they’re a little hard to read on this point.
I’m just making that assumption that you might want that info, because the answer to this particular case is: featured images are not copies of regular image files (can you imagine the space they’d take up? :p). They’re pointers in the database, tied to each post. Specifically, the wp_postmeta table has the meta_key columns “thumbnail” and “thumbnail_id”, which tell WP which image is a post’s featured image.
But if you move your database properly, you don’t have to worry about copying and pasting individual tables. 🙂
Thank you for your reply. I really appreciate it. I guess I have found a simpler way of doing this using the xml export functionality of wordpress.
Nice to see you here, Acharya, glad you figured it!
The XML export/import is good too, and much easier, but it’s not 100% reliable or complete.
In particular, the importer (at least the default plugin) has a hard time with images and other large files, one reason being that your host might limit process runtimes. But you said your article images are showing fine, and I’m guessing you didn’t check “import media and images” since you were manually copying them. So that might not be the problem.
There are other ways for a mismatch to happen, and I don’t know them all, but one of them could be that different media IDs were assigned during the move and the pointers are now off… just a stab in the dark.
Maybe you could describe what you see in more detail? Do you get posts that seem to have no featured image at all, or do they have featured images but the links are broken, or what? Do any of the thumbnails appear on category/archive pages?
P.S. Official support will be back after the weekend but since it’s not a theme-related question, they might direct you elsewhere. I’m not a professional by any means but hopefully we can figure it out 🙂
