A recent client had her blog, thefatandskinnyonfashion.com, well-developed in Blogger, including thousands of categories and tags. She was even using a custom domain name (see how you can setup a custom domain name for your blogspot or blogger blog). She asked us to move her very active blog from Blogger to WordPress for a number of reasons including improved SEO and ease of posting and we are glad that she called on BlogWranglers.com to migrate to WordPress.

Moving the Text is Easy. Images, not so much.

As you can see in the Move Counter statistics in the top right of our website, we move a lot of blog posts and comments in a year so we knew we could help her. Of course moving the content itself is the “easy” part. Blogger or Blogspot offer a blog export of your content which, when working — which was fifty percent of the time during this move — allows a very easy move of the content to WordPress.

Unfortunately, there are several hard parts that the export tools don’t handle well.   This has forced us to develop some pretty slick routines for moving the hard parts of a Blogger blog to WordPress including specifically the images. The images you upload in Blogger posts are stored in a Picasa Web Album.

When you upload an image through Blogger, it gets stored on Picasa Web Albums, and is therefore subject to the quota limit on your account there. You can log in there with your Google Account to access all your images. Source Link

Go ahead and open that album using your Google Account. You will see that the images have names that are impossible like:
[not a real link] http://lh3.ggpht.com/_a9N_t1kDwYo/TD_PQAdbT4I/AAAAAAAAC7Y/i2iPIxuBqyA/s512/IMG_0849-1.jpg

However in your blog, an image will be linked thus:

[not a real link] http://sitename.com/1.bp.blogspot.com/_a9N_t1kDwYo/S2XR_3ZF4dI/AAAAAAAACQw/pP2EYjg_61Q/s400/descriptive-name-of-image.jpg

Of course this is even more complicated because some images are in sequentially numbered sub-domains. For example on 2.bp.blogspot.com and 3. and 4. and so forth.

Matching Image Names to Posts

So while you can make a complete back-up of your Picasa Album, how do you match these image names to the right post and make the images work in your blog? That is precisely the process we have perfected over our last several moves and why our services can be helpful to you.

We make a copy of your images using the name referred to in the blog posts instead of the cryptic numbering scheme found by default in your Picasa Web Album. We can then correct the links in your new WordPress blog to point to your now local copy of each image.  Having a local copy of your images is important because Picasa can be pulled out from under you with no warning.  Also retrieving images from remote sources is generally slower and linking to your photos from a third party site like Picasa is an example.

Also, all images in Picasa Web Albums are stored in two sizes, the display size S400 is most common, but you may also see S72-c, S200, S320, S640, etc. The s72 being a thumbnail image. The others are at the dimension that Blogger will display them in your post. If you then have a full sized image that you link to it will be an S1600, but the link will be to S1600-h (h meaning HTML) because it is wrapped in an HTML page. Our process grabs both sizes and duplicates them in your WordPress install and links to them from your posts and pages correctly.

Aside: Even if you are staying on blogger, we can generate lists of what images go with what posts and pages.  This would be very helpful to you in the case of catastrophic loss on your blog.  With the list we generate you could actually rebuild your entire site from a backup.

The Rest of the Blogger to WordPress Move

What other services did we offer on this move? Several.

• We moved all posts and comments
• We created the several users who had made posts and kept their posts attributed to them
• We moved the images (display size and full size) and adjusted the links to continue them on the new site
• We re-created a near identical theme in WordPress to match the original theme design
• We adjusted the Google Friend Connect to get her friends to the new site
• We made sure that she knew how to adjust her Feedburner feed to keep her friends subscribed to the new posts

With every Blogger migration that we complete we further refine and improve the migration process.  We are to the point where it is pretty smooth and straight forward and I think our client will tell you it was fairly painless.

Can we help you with your Blogger move to WordPress content publishing platform? Give us a hollar using the Contact page if you think we can help you.

Want to see the before and after? The photos above are the proof of a smooth move.  We made only a few select changes and the average reader will not notice that the entire blog was moved.