I did some further testing and can add that it does work with DIVI (images and background image for a section).
Hence, this is obviously related to Elementor.
I also tested this with Phoenix Media Rename instead of your plugin. The same issue is happening there as well, so perhaps the both of you can share your findings if you want to try to fix it
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/background-images-are-not-updated-404-error/#post-15740504
Thanks in advance!
Hi @markussss,
Indeed, Elementor encodes its data, and therefore it is impossible to find/replace specific strings in it. One way would be to process each post one by one, it’s what I do with Media Cleaner for example, and that plugin of mine can find the images and their names; but that’s a very long and painful process that would not fit the experience of a plugin that rename files (that should be fast, it should take hours or days for each rename).
I am actually thinking on how to warn the users of Elementor when they install the plugin, as they should be extra careful.
What sadden me a bit is that Elementor is a really famous plugin, and they use paths directly, they should really use the IDs of the images, that would work out of the box and avoid this issue.
By the way, if there is an alternative solution, of if the Elementor Team has an idea on how it would be possible to rename files and have them updated in their encoded data, I would be happy to hear 🙂 You are a customer of Elementor? If yes, could you maybe contact the support, ask them and/or give them the link to this thread?
Hi @tigroumeow
Thanks for explaining. It’s really unfortunate, I noticed other issues as well with Elementor when it comes to search/replace URLs with the Better Search Replace plugin. I am not sure if those issues are related but it’s also because Elementor stores the data in its “own encoded format” in the database.
In this case (background images not renamed), it is probably stored in the CSS files.
Renaming does work at least with ordinary images.
The issue is only with the background images (goes into CSS).
Such a plugin you offer is very delicate because it must work, otherwise the site will break. In my case I invested about a full day to manually fix this, hence I am looking for a solution, as this could easily happen to many others as well.
I doubt that the Elementor support team can do much about it, but I opened a feature request on Github and refer to this post
https://github.com/elementor/elementor/issues/18942
Thanks a lot for opening this; maybe they will bring an idea, that would be really be nice of them.
I also posted and explained this in the Elementor Facebook community … the response from the community was not that positive.
Basically they said, just name your images correctly before uploading it, or use the media replace plugin.
They didn’t understand that this is wayyyy more work than just renaming. And renaming in general does work, only for Elementor background images it doesn’t.
The Media Replace plugin wouldn’t do anything except replacing an image by another (using the same file name).
Elementor should really use IDs to point at the medias instead of paths, that’s it. Like WordPress use IDs to reference posts, not their titles or content.
Problem is that they built it like this at the beginning, and they can’t really go back. Modern page builders usually don’t have this issue.
Oh I remember from the discussions in the Elementor community, that there was an argument that using the ID instead of the path requires an additional lookup, hence impacts the performance (not coming from Elementor but from the community)
I understand that there is nothing you could do about it, except running through all the CSS files which hardly can’t be meaningful and probably would bring a ton of other issues
From now on, I tell clients basically that they could use the plugin to rename images, but that it’ll lead to broken links for the background images, so that they can only perform it on normal images (difficult for the client to understand of course)
Oh I remember from the discussions in the Elementor community, that there was an argument that using the ID instead of the path requires an additional lookup, hence impacts the performance (not coming from Elementor but from the community)
Yes, but they could cache it; all their encoded data takes time to process anyway, so maybe they already have cache on this 😉 And there aren’t many WordPress sites which work without any caching (using plugins, DB caching, or caching at the server level). It’s really not an excuse.
I understand that there is nothing you could do about it, except running through all the CSS files which hardly can’t be meaningful and probably would bring a ton of other issues
The only way would be to go through all the posts, decode them, search/replace, and re-encode. I am already analyzing Elementor data in my [Media Cleaner](https://wordpress.org/plugins/media-cleaner/) plugin, the problem is that it wouldn’t make sense for a file renamer to process the data for hours for every rename 🙂
I can totally see your point and understand that … checkmate! It simply won’t do, unless Elementor comes to its senses in this particular case.
If you manage to add a warning somehow, that could probably save people who use Elementor + your plugin quite some headache. Background images simply can’t be renamed.
If you manage to add a warning somehow, that could probably save people who use Elementor + your plugin quite some headache. Background images simply can’t be renamed.
You are saying that the only issue right now is with the background images? The renaming works with all the other Elementor modules?
I tested on 2 sites. My client renamed approx. 500 images on an Elementor site with WooCommerce + JetEngine + Dynamic.ooo + Permalink Manager Pro ..to name the most important plugins.
The renaming worked all the time, except for images that are added as a background image (e.g. section/column background). Of course, I couldn’t test all the available widgets of Elementor, e.g. not sure if the image in an CTA module is added as a background image or as an image.
However, right now, I tested on a 3rd site.
Surprisingly, it did work there.
I am overly confused, and perhaps need to go back to start with troubleshooting
Just a quick further input – might be of interest – might be not – but worth sharing
The other plugin I referenced already and you name yourself in your plugin description implemented a “solution” for the issue with Elementor background images
Not sure if this is interesting for you, but perhaps it helps to share knowledge
https://wordpress.org/support/topic/background-images-are-not-updated-404-error/#post-15788921
Have a wonderful weekend!
Hi @markussss,
Indeed, I can see how he implemented it 🙂 That’s what I was talking about earlier; encoding and decoding each post individually in order to perform the rename.
That would work fine on a test and simple install, but on a real install with many posts, the process would take forever, times out with a lot (lots!) of side effects in production.
I can provide a code snippet that could do the same thing within Media File Renamer, but I wouldn’t implement it directly (or it could be an option, checked out by default, with a warning in the case it’s enabled). The real solution would be to implement it in a way that it’s processed little by little, through small requests and a progress bar (which can be done easily in my case since I have my own dashboard over it).
Hi @tigroumeow
Thanks for taking all the time to go over my messages (feeling guilty already, but who thought that this was such a big topic in the end)
I cannot say what would be the best approach, as you clearly have a better understanding of this. I am just the careful user / admin who noticed that the renaming (with Elementor enabled) can lead to quite some troubles.
In the end it’s up to you .. if you find it useful to add an additional function to make the plugin more reliable and compatible that’s definitely in the interest of everyone (even though many ppl would’t be even aware of it)
If you move on with this topic, perhaps you can comment in here to let me know.
Thanks
