Add the option to NOT find and replace the urls with /uploads when pulling so you can still see the media without downloading all the media for a site

[zachmihalko]

I don’t know how other people feel about this but I have limited amount of storage space on my machine and syncing larger sites to my machines gives me even less.

I know you can choose not to sync the /uploads folder when pulling but it would be nice to still be able to see the live media urls by just not replacing the urls for the whole site with /uploads in them. Because then you’d be able to still view the live site media file but not have to have it duplicated on your machine.

[emmtre]

How do you map your uploads folder?

I tried to search this in the forum and in the help docs with the keywords and phrasing I know to use, but I’m not really good at this so maybe I’m describing it wrong. I’m simply using Local to test my site before they move us to mysql 8.0. I have a multisite, so I’m following their guide on to manually import a multisite. My uploads folder is way too large to move things on my computer, so I downloaded a zip without it. In the WP Engine call showing people how to use Local, they mentioned y…

[zachmihalko]

Ohh interesting.

I was more thinking of Local adding a checkbox to the push/pull screen where underneath the “include database” option there would be a “Do not find and replace media urls”

[Nick-B]

Thank you for the feature request!

Are these larger sites filled with specific media like video, audio or is it all images or other file types?

[zachmihalko]

I mean this could be for any file in the /uploads folder. Just an example one site that is on my plate has 38GB of media in the /uploads folder so when I pull to my local machine I always omit the /uploads folder but then all the image urls are broken because they are looking for the media url with .local in the address.

[Nick-B]

Understood! Thanks for the insight. I can see how something like this would be useful. I generally just caution users to always consider if their media libraries could be optimized. To the point, Emmtre and Ben were making in that thread linked above, generally speaking having a huge uploads directory can be problematic. It can cause issues with pushing/pulling the site, creating backups, migrating, etc. but also things like non-optimized images, video, and audio files can cause a lot of slowness and performance strain.