Tumblr2WordPress: Export Your Tumblr Blog To WordPress RSS

This tool will create a WordPress compatible XML file from your Tumblr blog, which you can then save and import into WordPress.

Welcome, fear-stricken Tumblr friend!

Good morning! By now you'll have heard the news—or be frantically responding to the rumour thereof—that Tumblr is selling to Yahoo for a gigantic pot of money. Congratulations to them, you may think, followed by a spinal chill of panic as your mind harks back to the bloodied fates of previous Yahoo acquisitions: Geocities, Upcoming, Delicious…

Firstly, don't panic. No matter what anyone is saying on the internet, it's very unlikely that anything will change suddenly; that's not how these things work. Plus, Yahoo's intentions will be for Tumblr to be a success, and it's under new management, so you never know, it might work out. Still, regardless of what happens to the services we love in the future, it is always smart to have back-ups, so hopefully this tool can help you, whether you want to jump ship for WordPress, or just have some piece of mind.

There are a few things that you should note:

This tool is old. It was written a few years ago when I intended to merge my Tumblr into a WordPress install. I never did it, and the tool is a little incomplete as a result. It's still here, though.
The tool was written before Tumblr had support for multiple image uploads, so if you do a lot of that you might not get the full export you're hoping for.
The tool was also written before WordPress introduced their own concept of top-level post types: Photos, Quotes, Video posts, etc. All posts from this tool will be appropriately categorised, but maybe not quite as cleverly as newer WordPress tools. You might want to consider the Tumblr Importer plugin for WordPress instead.
The tool will give you some highly pedantic and slightly opinionated HTML5 output. Which is all good. And it will attempt to coerce Audio into an HTML5 audio player too. The actual file may or may not work in this form, depending on the original source.
Posts with images will still reference the images on Tumblr's servers. If you want to copy the images to your server as well you'll either need to run another script, or install a WordPress plugin such as Milan Dinicć's Cache Images plugin.

All that being said, you might still find the tool useful, and I hope you do. The code was originally written by Hao Chen, and was substantially updated by me, Ben Ward.

The source code (which, I cannot stress enough, is very old now) is on Github, if you'd like to run your own copy or make changes.

Notes and Help

So, you're migrating your blog. Good for you! If you're running your tumblr blog on your own domain (yourdomain.com rather than me.tumblr.com, for example), then you can set up redirects from the old URLs that people are still linking to, to the imported post on your new WordPress blog.

Basically, where you have a Tumblr post URL that looks like this: http://example.com/post/12345678/this-is-a-post, the only part that matters is http://example.com/post/12345678/. That number is the ID. Everything after that gets ignored when Tumblr loads the post.

When you export your post, you're encouraged to include that post ID in the new permalink slugs, since that way you can redirect from one to the other.

If you take your current Tumblr custom domain, and host it yourself, you can set up a simple .htaccess redirect for people linking to your old posts:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?posts/([0-9]+).*$ http://wordpress.example.com/blog/$1

Tumblr2WordPress: Export Your Tumblr to WordPress

Welcome, fear-stricken Tumblr friend!

Notes and Help