Import External images are pictures that are visible on your WordPress website but are not saved in your website Media Library. These pictures come from another website, CDN, or social media.
If you don’t take care of these pictures, they can slow down your website. Sometimes they stop loading or disappear altogether when the website from which the image came is down.
The good news is that it’s not difficult to bring external images into the WordPress Media Library. You just need to know the right method. We’ve helped many website owners and tested numerous methods to find the easiest and best solution.
In this guide, we’ll explain in simple steps how to import external images into WordPress. We’ll also provide tips on how to avoid some common mistakes and tell you about tools that can make this task even easier.
Want to stay ahead with AI-driven WordPress insights and stay updated with the latest trends? Subscribe for daily search insights at wpguidepro to improve your WordPress strategy
Table of Contents
Why Import External Images WordPress?
External images are pictures that are embedded in your content, but are not loaded from your main WordPress website. These images come from another website or external link, separate from your website.
Most WordPress users encounter this issue when they migrate their website from Blogger, Weebly, Joomla, or WordPress to WordPress. This often results in broken image links, which is not good for SEO.
Normally, when you use the WordPress importer, it also tries to import images, such as featured images or thumbnails. You can find imported images on the Media → Library page in your WordPress dashboard.
If you see that all the images are in the Media Library, but the image links within the posts are still pointing to the old website, then you don’t need this article. In this case, simply updating the URLs is sufficient.
But if your images are not visible in the Media Library, then continue. Next, we’ll show you how to import external images into the WordPress Media Library without downloading and re-uploading the images.
Importing External Images in WordPress With Auto Upload Images
If you’re having issues with external images on your WordPress website, using the right plugin can easily resolve this issue. The Auto Upload Images plugin is very useful for this purpose, as it automatically pulls incoming images and saves them to the WordPress Media Library.
First, install and activate the plugin. If you don’t know how to install the plugin, you can follow WordPress standard plugin installation method, which is very simple.
One important thing: You may notice that this plugin doesn’t show tested with the latest WordPress version. But don’t worry. We’ve tested it ourselves, and it works perfectly. If you find another plugin in the future that does the same job or better, you can try that too.
After the plugin is activated, go to the WordPress dashboard and click Settings → Auto Upload Images.
The default settings here are often fine for most people. But if you want, you can change a few things to your liking.
For example:
- Which folder should images be saved in?
- What should the image name be?
- Image alt text?
- Image size?
- Which post types should I skip?
If you change any settings, be sure to click the Save Changes button below; otherwise, the changes won’t be saved.
The next step is to update the posts or pages that have external images. If there are many posts, this process can take some time.
There’s a faster way to do this. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Posts → All Posts and click Screen Options at the top.
Set the Number of items per page to 999 and click Apply. The page will reload, and many posts will appear at once.
Note: If your hosting is slow, updating 999 posts at once can cause problems. In such a situation, update posts in small batches or use better hosting.
Now select all posts by clicking the checkbox next to Title. Then, choose Edit from Bulk Actions and click Apply.
The Bulk Edit box will open. Do not change any settings here. Just click the Update button.
As soon as you update, the plugin will start working, and WordPress will automatically import the external images into the Media Library.
If you have more than 999 posts, go to the next page and repeat these steps for the remaining posts.
FAQs About Importing External Images in WordPress
Hopefully, this tutorial has given you an understanding of how to import external images into WordPress. If you still have any questions, simple answers are provided below.
How to import a media library into WordPress?
First, go to the website from which you want to import the media library. In the WordPress dashboard, click Tools → Export. Select Media here and download the media library file.
You can then upload these files to your new website using a plugin like WordPress Importer. This way, you can import the media library from your old website to your new site.
Why aren’t all images showing in the WordPress Media Library?
If not all images are showing in your Media Library, it’s often due to an image upload issue. This problem is caused by excessive file permissions.
To fix this issue, you need to change the file permissions. Once the permissions are corrected, the images will start showing in the Media Library again.
I hope these answers will be helpful and you’ll be able to manage your WordPress images easily.
