Useful hotlinked image cacher
Blogger.com does not allow images that it stores to be hotlinked from sites other than its own. So if I want to migrate a blog from Blogger.com to another blogging platform, I would have to move the images to someplace else. While I did it manually with this blog, since there weren’t a lot of images and many of them were already hosted elsewhere, manually moving images and updating URLs when there are hundreds of them is far too much work for me.
That’s why I’ve been searching for a way to automatically copy over images from Blogger.com’s image site to my own WordPress site. One WordPress plugin that looked promising was one specifically made for copying images from Blogger to WordPress. Unfortunately, it won’t work if most of the images are not also links.
A more general-purpose plugin is the Hot Linked Image Cacher, which caches all hotlinked images in your own site. This looks like it would be perfect for moving images out of Blogger.com, except that it stores the images in the plugin directory and the word “caching” has me worried that the images expire. I’m also worried that it might not work if I deactivate it, since I would only need to use the plugin once. But it still looks like a plugin that would do the job.
So I was taken aback when I came across a visceral reaction someone had against the plugin. The person is lambasting the plugin for being a thief’s tool. And that’s all the person does; the possibility that it could be useful for very legitimate purposes doesn’t even occur to to the person:
- When you’re trying to move tons of your own images embedded in your own blog.
- Some sites like NASA and Flickr explicitly permit hotlinking.
- If you’re hotlinking to a free image hosted at Flickr and are uncertain whether it will always stay there, the plugin would be very useful.
- If the site owning a free image is very slow, it would help alleviate its bandwidth consumption and make your own site display faster.
It’s perfectly understandable that illegitimate hotlinking would be harshly criticized. But it seems a bit asinine that a plugin that would be very useful for legitimate purposes would receive the same treatment with no caveats.
Despite all that, I wonder if there’s a better way to move tons of images stored at Blogger to WordPress?
