Migrating from Media Cloud by ILAB

4 min readUpdated June 28, 2026

Media Cloud by ILAB (ilab-media-tools) is an abandoned WordPress plugin that has not received security updates or maintenance in several years. If your site is running it, migrating to WP Media Cloud is strongly recommended. Your files stay in your storage bucket exactly where they are. The migration reads ILAB’s postmeta records and creates WP Media Cloud tracking records pointing at the same files. No files are moved, copied, or re-uploaded.

Supported providers#

ILAB supports a wider range of providers than WP Offload Media. WP Media Cloud can import from all of them:

Amazon S3 (ILAB s3 → WP Media Cloud s3)
DigitalOcean Spaces (ILAB do → WP Media Cloud do)
Wasabi (ILAB wasabi → WP Media Cloud wasabi)
Bunny.net (ILAB bunnycdn → WP Media Cloud bunny)
Google Cloud Storage (ILAB google → WP Media Cloud gcs)
Cloudflare R2 (ILAB cloudflare → WP Media Cloud r2)
Backblaze B2 (ILAB backblaze or backblaze-s3 → WP Media Cloud b2)
MinIO and other S3-compatible providers (ILAB minio or other-s3 → WP Media Cloud s3compat)

How ILAB stores offload data#

Unlike WP Offload Media, ILAB does not use a dedicated database table. All offload information is stored in WordPress postmeta on each attachment. For images, ILAB embeds an s3 sub-array inside _wp_attachment_metadata. For non-image files, it uses a separate ilab_s3_info postmeta key. WP Media Cloud reads both during the import.

Before you start#

Take a full database backup. The migration writes new records to the WP Media Cloud database table. A backup lets you roll back if needed.
Install and licence WP Media Cloud. See Installation and Activating your licence.
Configure WP Media Cloud with the same storage provider and bucket that ILAB was using. Use the setup wizard or wp-config.php constants to connect.
Run the connection test and confirm it passes before proceeding.
Do not disable ILAB yet. Keep both plugins active during the migration to avoid any gap in URL rewriting while the import runs.

Running the migration#

Go to Media Cloud > Migration. WP Media Cloud will detect ILAB’s postmeta records and display a summary showing the total number of offloaded attachments, how many have already been imported, and how many remain.

Click Start Migration. WP Media Cloud reads ILAB’s postmeta records in batches and creates corresponding WP Media Cloud tracking records pointing at the same files in the same bucket. Progress is shown as the import runs. The migration can be paused and resumed at any time.

No files are moved or re-uploaded. The import is a database operation only.

What the migration imports#

For each ILAB-tracked attachment, WP Media Cloud imports:

The WordPress attachment post ID
The storage provider and bucket
The full storage path of the primary file
The paths of all thumbnail sizes, read from ILAB’s size metadata
The original pre-scaled image path if present
The CDN base URL from ILAB’s mcloud-storage-cdn-base option, if one was configured

After the migration completes#

Verify — go to Media > Library and click on several images. Confirm the file URL in the attachment details panel shows your storage bucket or CDN hostname rather than your site URL.
Enable URL rewriting in WP Media Cloud — go to WP Media Cloud > Settings and confirm Rewrite URLs is enabled.
Deactivate ILAB — once you have confirmed WP Media Cloud is serving correct URLs, deactivate Media Cloud by ILAB from the Plugins page. WP Media Cloud takes over URL rewriting immediately.
Delete ILAB — as ILAB is abandoned and unmaintained, deleting it entirely is recommended once you have confirmed the migration is successful.
Test the site — browse several pages and confirm images load correctly.

Troubleshooting#

Migration tab shows zero offloaded items
WP Media Cloud detects ILAB’s offload data via the ilab_s3_info and ilab_s3_data postmeta keys. If no items are found, ILAB may not have completed any offloads, or the postmeta may have been cleaned up. Confirm ILAB was active and had offloaded files by checking its own settings before migrating.

Some attachments show errors during import
If an ILAB postmeta record has no key value in its s3 data, WP Media Cloud cannot determine the file path and skips that attachment with an error count. These are attachments where ILAB’s tracking data is incomplete. Check those attachments individually in the media library and re-offload them using WP Media Cloud’s bulk migration tool if needed.

Images return 404 after deactivating ILAB
Confirm URL rewriting is enabled in WP Media Cloud > Settings and that the storage provider, bucket name, and credentials match what ILAB was using. Run the connection test to confirm. If the bucket or provider has changed since ILAB was last active, re-configure WP Media Cloud for the current provider and run the connection test again.

CDN hostname is not being applied after migration
WP Media Cloud reads the CDN base URL from ILAB’s mcloud-storage-cdn-base option during import. If the CDN URL is not appearing after migration, configure it directly in WP Media Cloud > Settings > CDN.