Localize hotlinked images into your media library

Hotlinked images are a slow leak. A post shows pictures loaded straight off someone else’s server, and the day that server moves the file, renames it, or blocks the referrer, your post shows a row of broken boxes. You did not do anything wrong, but the page looks abandoned. The fix is to host the images yourself, which by hand means downloading each one, uploading it, and pasting the new URL back in.

This runs that chore for you and still waits for your yes before it saves a thing.

[This post: https://example.com/my-post/] pulls its images from other
people's servers, and I want them hosted here instead. Start read-only:
read the post, list every image whose URL points at a domain that is not
mine, and show me that list with nothing changed yet.

Wait for my yes. Only after I approve, go image by image: fetch each
external image and add it to the media library as base64 (jpg, png, gif,
and webp are fine; SVG will be rejected), then swap that old external URL
in the post body for the new local one with a literal find-and-replace.
Work in small batches and show me each batch before it saves, and leave
everything except the image URLs alone. When you finish, give me the list
of every image you pulled in and every URL you replaced.

Why this is safe to run

The first pass is reads. Reading the post and picking out the off-site image URLs changes nothing, so you approve the exact list before any file is uploaded or any URL is swapped.

The write half is deliberately narrow. The upload ability adds images to your library as base64 and rejects SVG outright, so nothing scriptable sneaks in through an image. The swap is a literal find-and-replace on the body, one old URL for one new one, so the surrounding text and the post status are untouched and each edit is a revision you can roll back. As always, the media and content write abilities stay off until you enable them, every call is checked against the bound user’s capability, and every upload and edit is written to the Activity Log.

Already connected? Skip the paste. Ask your agent for the “localize hotlinked images” recipe, or just point it at the post, and it runs the same find-approve-swap flow on your own install.