Title: Mass Edit: Changing Categories
Last modified: August 18, 2016

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# Mass Edit: Changing Categories

 *  [reloaded](https://wordpress.org/support/users/reloaded/)
 * (@reloaded)
 * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/)
 * Is there an easy way or plug-in that let’s me change categories of several entries
   at once? I’ve made a few new categories on my blog and I would like to recatorize
   about 200 posts. Is there an easy way to do this without editing them all one
   at a time?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  [tychoish](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tychoish/)
 * (@tychoish)
 * [18 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/#post-491815)
 * I have the same issue, so I want to bump this back up to the top.
 * After the 3.2 transition I have a bunch of entries that are “uncategorized” that
   didn’t go back to the default category. I’d be ok if there were a way to solve
   this using a simple query, I just don’t have a clue on how to do this without
   mucking it up…
 *  [dalebert77](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dalebert77/)
 * (@dalebert77)
 * [18 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/#post-491816)
 * This is do the trick, but it will also move all of your pages to the new category
   as well – I’m sure there is a SQL guru out there that can change this to use 
   a join statement that would filter out pages:
 * UPDATE `wp_term_relationships` SET `term_taxonomy_id` = ‘THE_NEW_NUMBER_OF_YOUR_CATEGORY’
   WHERE `term_taxonomy_id` = 1;
 * BTW – the term_taxonomy_id = 1 is the uncategorized category.
 *  [dalebert77](https://wordpress.org/support/users/dalebert77/)
 * (@dalebert77)
 * [18 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/#post-491817)
 * Ok – I took sometime to think about it – this will update all posts only in the
   uncategorized category and move them to category #5 (you can get the cat number
   from admin/manage/categories – look at the cat id):
 * UPDATE `wp_term_relationships`
    SET `wp_term_relationships`.`term_taxonomy_id`
   = ‘5’ WHERE `wp_term_relationships`.`term_taxonomy_id` = 1 AND EXISTS (SELECT*
   FROM `wp_posts` AS A1 WHERE A1.ID = `wp_term_relationships`.`object_id` AND A1.`
   post_type` = “post”);
 *  [tychoish](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tychoish/)
 * (@tychoish)
 * [18 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/#post-491818)
 * thanks for the update, sorry for my lack of clarity in the inital post. clearly
   I meant 2.3.
 * I like the second query more, of course. my main question, is that the category
   that I really want to move everything into is the first category, and it looks
   from all accounts that the first category created and thus it looks like it has
   the term_taxonomy_id=’1′ which is why this is so curious….
 * thanks.
 *  [sam_a](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sam_a/)
 * (@sam_a)
 * [18 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/#post-491819)
 * [http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/batch-categories](http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/batch-categories)
 * > This WordPress plugin lets you batch edit your posts: assign multiple posts
   > to a category or delete multiple posts from a category in one fell swoop. Version
   > 1.2 and above also support WordPress 2.3’s in-built tagging system, allowing
   > you to tag and un-tag multiple posts at once.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘Mass Edit: Changing Categories’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 5 replies
 * 4 participants
 * Last reply from: [sam_a](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sam_a/)
 * Last activity: [18 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/mass-edit-changing-categories/#post-491819)
 * Status: not resolved

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