Moving Media from One WordPress Site to Another

Every now and then you want to set up a fresh WordPress install, usually when the site is going in a different direction and a lot of their data then becomes redundant. When working with a client I had to find a way to do this and keep hold of all their media. Before I was ready to import the media I created a blank WordPress site (v4.3), the reason I used a blank site was to make sure there were no conflicts with IDs of the media I was importing.

WordPress stores all media library uploads into the database. Firstly, it creates a new post entry, this has a type of attachment. Secondly, it creates metadata attached to the post to store all the property information of the image. Knowing these two things allows us to set up a query on the SQL to grab the data.

Getting the Posts

We will get the posts first. To do this you will need to load into your selected database management tool. I am a big fan of Sequel Pro so the following screenshots will be utilising that tool. In your tool we will run a query on the database;

SELECT * FROM `wp_posts` where `post_type` = "attachment"

Don't forget to update the prefix of wp_ to whatever prefix your database uses.

If the query was executed correctly it should of returned any posts which are stored in the database as media files. For me, this was around 2800 records. Next we need to export these.