I am moving over to self-hosting on WordPress.org and need to migrate a very large number of images over to my new blog there.
I had been advised by my host (DreamHost) to use FTP to "copy the wp-content folder" over but then I read a previous forum thread which said I cannot use FTP to access WordPress.COM - is this true? Is there no way I can access the database that is holding my images & videos here on WordPress.com?
The old forum thread suggested leaving all old images on my old blog here and "hot-linking" to my new blog. OK - I'm happy to do this but will it matter that my existing blog here is already mapped to a domain name which will be transferred to the new self-hosted site when it is ready? ie. I never used the URL with "wordpress.com" in it for my blog - my readers always just used the domain name from the beginning. But when I change the nameservers, that domain is going to point to my new site.
Also - what about videos? I have some videos uploaded into the VideoPress feature and are embedded in my posts - will they be "hotlinked too"?
Finally - what about videos embedded from YouTube? I know they're already being retrieved from an external site - so what happens when I migrate my blog over to the new self-hosted site?
Thank you.