Recently a client asked me to transfer their Tumblr blog to a new self hosted WordPress platform and it took me awhile to find a decent exporter to do the trick. WordPress used to have a plugin that would do this for you but it is no longer supported and many of the sites out there that claim to offer a similar service are no longer active.
After search and search I found a simple solution on the WordPress forums. Here is how you do it.
- Go to https://github.com/BenWard/tumblr2wordpress and follow the instructions to export your Tumblr content
- Download the xml file
- Login to you WordPress installation, go to “Tools” and then “Import”
- Choose to import the new file as a WORDPRESS file and NOT a Tumblr file.
- Let WordPress do its thing and you should soon have all your posts from Tumblr in WordPress
It is that easy!
Bonus Tip: When you import your Tumblr blog into WordPress it will not download the images from the posts into WordPress. This can be annoying, especially if you plan on deleting your Tumblr account which would also delete your images. There is a plugin that can take care of this for you and will automatically download all your externally linked images to your local media library. This way you don’t have to worry about losing those images. Here is the plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-linked-images-to-gallery-v01/ Use at your own risk and remember to ALWAYS backup your database and site before implementing a huge change like this.
