There are find/replace plugins that can help you replace the old URL of images being used in posts and pages. That should help you get things set-up as you want.
Malcolm, thanks much for your response.
I’ve been building sites for 25 years, but am new to WP. As part of the transition I’m trying to learn how to move WP from one host to another. Moving the text is easy, and I get I’m going to have manually reinstall widgets and menus etc. Images are the problem.
If your time permits, a couple of questions..
1) Should the WP importer be grabbing the images from the old host, or from my computer, and uploading them to the new host? I do have images backed up on my computer, but see no way to upload them via the WP dashboard.
2) Should the WP importer be editing the HTML of all pages to change the image URLs so they point to an image storage location on the new host?
I’m trying to understand whether the WP importer should normally be expected to perform these jobs. Or, is it my job to upload images via FTP and then do a find/replace as you suggest? What procedures do people normally use when moving a WP site from one host to another?
Part of my confusion is that two hosts have told me repeatedly that transferring a site is easy and automated. This seems true of text, but not of images, best I can tell so far.
Thanks again for any advice!