Copying post thumbnail to custom field

Question

I've just moved to another theme, and it uses the custom field bigimage for associating an image with a post, instead of using WordPress's post thumbnails. How do I copy the URLs of all existing post-thumnails to their corresponding post's bigimage custom field?

Could we possibly write a bunch of MySQL statements to achieve this?

Answer 1

I wouldn't bother doing that.

I'd just find the places in your theme files that call the custom field (probably something like "echo get_post_meta('bigimage')" or something) and replace those with a the_post_thumbnail() tag.

This saves you the trouble of messing with the data, and it makes administration much, much simpler going forward--which is kind of the point of post thumbnails. And it'll probably take less time than rigging some SQL to copy all that data.

Answer 2

Sorry for not having a specific answer but this will point you in the right direction, you should be able to do this in your functions.php.

First off you probably want to get the post thumbnial using get_the_post_thumbnail

I would create an array function to get the post thumbnails, I will assume the "bigimage" has a key value in $wpdb->postmeta. If so you can use the http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_post_meta to then insert the image url or id or whatever into that custom field per post.