Importing from Tumblr

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Anyone got any tips’n’tricks or configuration hints for using either the Jekyll-Import script as a staging post, or maybe some other means –when migrating a blog from Tumblr to Hugo?

I migrated a blog [with over 100 posts] from Tumblr to Hugo, using Jekyll-Import a year or two ago and it was a horrendously painful process:

  • Jekyll-Import produced ‘broken’ [ie. incompatible with Hugo] front-matter which had to be manually fixed.
  • I couldn’t get Jekyll-Import to import my images at all in ‘Jekyll-Import markdown mode’. They were completely ignored, as if they weren’t even there.
  • In ‘Jekyll-Import HTML mode’ the images were present in the posts but all src attributes were just linking to the original images on Tumblr, even though I’d told Jekyll-Import to download images and rewrite URLs accordingly.
  • I eventually used SiteSucker to get a complete dump of my Tumblr blog, images and all, so i could add them to the site folder in Hugo –but the image paths were monstrous: 1.bp.blogspot.com/_8DTb9bKiRjU/S3x5fNLWJ6I/AAAAAAAAA8s/wvVIUodXBGI/s400/IMG_0357.jpg being a typical example.

In the end I had to spend about two weeks manually editing every single post to fix front-matter, broken markdown and impose sanity on the images, before I was up and running with Hugo. The thought of having to go through the same again with this other blog [which contains 157 posts] fills me with dread, but I really want to get it off Tumblr and under my own control with Hugo.

So, as I said. Any tips, folks?

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Try https://github.com/jaanus/tumblr2markdown.

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Well, that has advanced the cause somewhat, in that Tumblr2Markdown was at least able to keep the images with the posts when downloading. Although it downloaded the posts as HTML, not the Markdown I was expecting and retained all the crappy proprietary Tumblr gallery link tags and other junk surrounding the images and formatting portions of the text.

So still a lot of tweaking by hand to do, but I’m kind of resigned to that anyway. At least I’ve now got everything in one local directory.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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Hi all,

Wanted to contributed my part to the community, I took Tumblr2Markdown and combined it with html2text, and now have a more or less fully working Tumblr -> Hugo Markdown format exporter :). You can try it here: https://github.com/Wysie/tumblr2hugomarkdown

It includes a number of features such as:

  • Replacing links if they’re pointing to your current Tumblr blog with Hugo’s relref pointing to the Markdown file
  • Front matter is formatted properly for Hugo
  • Ability to set if export Markdown files should be in draft mode or not
  • If downloading images, it will by default download to individual folders (based on the markdown file name)

The only limitation is that I’ve commented out parts of the original code so it only exports “text” body types from Tumblr at the moment, you can easily uncomment that portion but I haven’t test how it performs. I hope this helps :)!

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