Import Facebook Posts/Media to Ghost

Developer help Migrations
1

Hello.

My wife is wanting to move off of Facebook and I am setting up a Ghost site for her. She would like to bring her Facebook posts, images and videos along with her. I have looked high and low for information about importing/migrating content from Facebook to Ghost, but there seems to be no tooling available.

Surely others have done this — it’s pretty straight-forward to export a zip file containing all your posts and media from facebook.

Does such tooling exist?

If not, I’m perfectly willing to write a tool to do so.

However, the Ghost documentation on constructing migration tools is . . . well, slim. Not much more than “construct a suitable JSON file from the data you have”. Description of the JSON file required by the importer is next to non-existent.

Are there formal schemata that describe the contents of this file?

Suggestions about how best to proceed, or links to tools/code that someone has written to do this would be appreciated.

2

Agreed the documentation is pretty scant but it is fairly straightforward to write an importer. I’m working on my own in Python for Tumblr – others do exist but aren’t suitable for what I have, which is a local export, similar to yours.

The basic approach is to identify the elements within a post and create the HTML for this that Ghost uses. This is then embedded within the JSON for a post along with the rest of the metadata. Text is pretty easy, images need a little more work but you can rely on copying the image files into Ghost’s file system. Videos are trickier as it seems that Ghost needs some additional metadata.