Last year, I tried to migrate a personal picture blog away from WordPress.com.
So I cancelled the subscription, and hit the delete-everything button. Which refuses to work. Because I still have a subscription, see, so why would I want to delete things? So I could just wait until the subscription period ran out, at which point the button would presumably work, but at that point all my password-protected posts and pictures would also lose their password-protection, becoming free for all the world to see. So, no thank you. I'm being cagey with details here, but it's just vacation pictures of my kids, nothing special.
What to do instead? Click on each post, hit delete. Manually. No big deal, it's only a few dozen. But then, REPEAT THIS FOR EVERY PICTURE, because every picture has its own "post" in WordPress's database. Good thing I only uploaded TWO THOUSAND images. Seriously, clicking every single image manually was actually the fastest way to do it. Click all 2000 images (thank goodness there is that one view that at least allows multi-select), then click the delete button (and wait).
This was painful. Had I known this beforehand, I would not have started a Wordpress.com blog.
Also fun: at some point, WordPress.com had silently switched out all of my printable, high-resolution JPEGs for crappy, compressed WebPs. So I couldn't "just" import the Wordpress export into the next blog engine, I additionally had to finagle all of the pictures to point to the originals instead of the replacements. Of course this silent change had not in fact changed my storage quota. It still used three times the JPEGs' storage, which is why I wanted to migrate originally.
Or that Wordpress.com uses a custom gallery that does not, in fact, export correctly, so I had to redo all the galleries when I imported the old posts in the new engine.
Or that one time where they silently switched my theme, so all the galleries broke. And let's just not talk about the broken image upload if you're on anything but a rock-solid connection. (Hint: Gallery View, drag-and-drop, Edge, is the least unreliable process. The file picker, or directly inserting into posts, or Firefox or Chrome, just immediately quit as soon as the connection so much as drops a single packet).
The blog is now generated by Publii, which is delightful, but a very different animal.
TL;DR: Migrating away from Wordpress.com is even worse than using it.
Repeating a somewhat lengthy action 2000 times is for me an excuse to look into automating this with something like selenium or autohotkey. Something that automates mouse 'clicks' on a browser.
Measure how much time it would take to remove 5 images, multiply by 400. Can you automate it in less? Note that you might learn something new, and because it is a one-time script, it can be super hacky.
Well, the entire operation took maybe 20 minutes. I connected a graphics tablet for the occasion, which made click-click-clicking the pictures relatively quick.
I did actually weigh that time against how long it might take me to find/learn/use the API, but 20 minutes for a one-time task seemed preferable. Plus I could listen to podcasts.
Honestly, the painful part was re-importing all the original images and rebuilding all the galleries. But there was a convenient mandatory all-day online management training coming up at work that proved perfect for the job. That part took a good six hour, modulo some management training nonsense.
So I cancelled the subscription, and hit the delete-everything button. Which refuses to work. Because I still have a subscription, see, so why would I want to delete things? So I could just wait until the subscription period ran out, at which point the button would presumably work, but at that point all my password-protected posts and pictures would also lose their password-protection, becoming free for all the world to see. So, no thank you. I'm being cagey with details here, but it's just vacation pictures of my kids, nothing special.
What to do instead? Click on each post, hit delete. Manually. No big deal, it's only a few dozen. But then, REPEAT THIS FOR EVERY PICTURE, because every picture has its own "post" in WordPress's database. Good thing I only uploaded TWO THOUSAND images. Seriously, clicking every single image manually was actually the fastest way to do it. Click all 2000 images (thank goodness there is that one view that at least allows multi-select), then click the delete button (and wait).
This was painful. Had I known this beforehand, I would not have started a Wordpress.com blog.
Also fun: at some point, WordPress.com had silently switched out all of my printable, high-resolution JPEGs for crappy, compressed WebPs. So I couldn't "just" import the Wordpress export into the next blog engine, I additionally had to finagle all of the pictures to point to the originals instead of the replacements. Of course this silent change had not in fact changed my storage quota. It still used three times the JPEGs' storage, which is why I wanted to migrate originally.
Or that Wordpress.com uses a custom gallery that does not, in fact, export correctly, so I had to redo all the galleries when I imported the old posts in the new engine.
Or that one time where they silently switched my theme, so all the galleries broke. And let's just not talk about the broken image upload if you're on anything but a rock-solid connection. (Hint: Gallery View, drag-and-drop, Edge, is the least unreliable process. The file picker, or directly inserting into posts, or Firefox or Chrome, just immediately quit as soon as the connection so much as drops a single packet).
The blog is now generated by Publii, which is delightful, but a very different animal.
TL;DR: Migrating away from Wordpress.com is even worse than using it.