How to Import and Export WordPress Galleries and Albums Between Sites

A finished gallery holds more work than the photos in it. There’s the layout you picked, the captions and alt text you wrote, and the lightbox you set up the way you like it.

Moving that gallery to another WordPress site shouldn’t mean doing all of it again. The move comes up more than you’d think. A staging site goes live, or a client needs your galleries on their own site.

Envira Gallery handles it with an export file and an import button. I ran both on a test site for this post, with a gallery and an album. The screens below are the ones you’ll see.

The clicks are quick. What decides whether your first import works is knowing what the file carries and what it leaves behind.

When to Export and Import a WordPress Gallery

Envira Gallery is a WordPress gallery plugin, and its import and export tools do one job well: moving a single gallery to a different WordPress site with its photos and settings intact.

These are the situations where I reach for it:

• Staging to live. You built and tested your galleries on a copy of your site, and now they need to appear on the real one.
• Galleries for a client. You set them up on your own site first, then move them to the client’s site once they’re approved.
• Reusing a setup you like. A gallery you’ve fine-tuned on one site becomes the starting point on another site you run.
• Getting help with a gallery. You can send the file to a developer, who can rebuild the exact gallery on their own test site.

Each of these moves a handful of galleries, not a whole website.

Moving everything at once is a different job. For that, a full-site migration is usually the better tool. Our guide to moving your WordPress site to a new server walks through one way to do it.

If gallery photos stop showing after a move like that, Envira has a repair tool under Envira Gallery » Tools. Fix Broken Migration updates the photo addresses for one gallery or for all of them:

Run it once the move is finished, then open a few gallery pages to check the photos load.

Coming from Modula or FooGallery instead? The Envira Importer addon, included with every paid plan, brings those galleries across for you, as our Envira Importer announcement shows.

What You Need Before You Export a Gallery

A few things need to be in place before you start, and most of them apply to both sites:

• A paid Envira Gallery plan. Import and export come with every paid plan (Basic, Plus, Pro and Elite Bundle), but not with the free Lite version. Here’s how to upgrade from Envira Gallery Lite.
• The Albums addon, for albums. It’s included with Pro and above, and it has to be active on both sites. The Albums addon documentation covers the setup.
• An Administrator account. Only Administrators can export or import a gallery.
• The original site online and public. The new site copies each photo from the old one during the import. The old site can’t be offline, behind a login or password-protected while that runs.
• The same addons on the new site. If the gallery uses an addon such as Slideshow or Watermarking, activate it on the new site too.

With those in place, the export itself is a single click.

How to Export an Envira Gallery

On the site the gallery lives on now, go to Envira Gallery » Galleries and click the gallery’s title to edit it.

Scroll down to the gallery settings and open the Misc tab, near the bottom of the list on the left. Then click the Export button in the Export Gallery row:

Your browser downloads a file with a name like envira-gallery-516-11-05-2026.json. The number is the gallery’s ID, followed by the date.

A .json file is a plain text file, and this one doesn’t contain your photos. It lists where each photo lives, its title, caption, alt text and tags, plus the gallery’s settings.

My seven-photo gallery exported to a file of about 15 KB. One thing it doesn’t carry is the gallery’s name, so you’ll type that in again after the import.

How to Import an Envira Gallery Into Another Site

On the new site, go to Envira Gallery » Add New Gallery. Always import into a brand-new gallery, because importing into an existing one replaces everything already in it.

Open the Misc tab, click Choose a file… in the Import Gallery row, and pick the file you exported. Then click Import.

The import copies every photo from the original site into the new site’s Media Library, along with its title, caption and alt text. My seven photos took about 25 seconds, and the original site has to stay online until it finishes.

When it’s done, you’re back on the gallery’s Misc tab with the notice “Envira gallery imported. Please check to ensure all images and data have been imported properly.” Switch to the Gallery tab to see the photos, in their original order:

The gallery is still a draft called “Auto Draft”. Give it a title, check the photos, and click Publish. Our doc on creating your first Envira gallery shows how to place it on a page.

How to Export and Import an Envira Album

An album is a page of gallery covers, each opening its own gallery, as our post on the difference between albums and galleries explains. Album import and export works through the Albums addon (Pro and above).

The album file doesn’t carry your galleries. It saves the album’s layout and settings, plus a list of its galleries with their titles, ID numbers and gallery slugs. The slug is the Gallery Slug field at the top of each gallery’s Misc tab.

To export the album, go to Envira Gallery » Albums, edit the album, and open its Misc tab. Click Export Album to download a file named like envira-album-488-11-05-2026.json.

On the new site, go to Envira Gallery » Albums and add a new album. In the Misc tab, choose your file in the Import/Export Album row (the button’s label depends on your browser). Then click Import Album:

In my test, which ran on a single site, no confirmation message appeared. Envira opened the new album’s edit screen instead. All three galleries were attached, and the album was named “Imported Album #536”:

Rename the album and check that every gallery made it across, and that each one is the right gallery. Its web address starts out as imported-album plus the number, so edit the permalink too if the album has its own page. If you’d picked custom covers, look at those as well and pick them again with the pencil icon if needed. Then click Publish.

What to Check After Importing a Gallery or Album

An import can look finished and still be missing something. These are the checks I run every time:

• Count the photos. Compare the new gallery with the original. A photo the new site couldn’t download may be left out without a clear message. That usually means the old site was offline or behind a login.
• Give it a name. Galleries arrive as “Auto Draft” and albums as “Imported Album #” plus a number.
• Add it to your pages again. The gallery gets a new ID on the new site, so a shortcode or block that uses the old gallery number won’t show it. Use the Envira block or the new shortcode from the gallery screen.
• Check the album covers. Any custom cover you’d chosen may need picking again.
• Look at it as a visitor. Open the page, click a few photos, and make sure the layout and lightbox look the way they did on the old site.

Once those pass, your photos are stored in the new site’s Media Library and the move is done.

FAQs About Importing and Exporting WordPress Galleries

Moving a gallery comes down to one export, one import and a quick check before you publish. Before a bigger move, it’s also worth reading our guide on how to back up your complete WordPress website and photos.

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