The old hosting box still has your photos
Bone Voyage's share pictures are mostly too small, and I first told you no bigger versions existed anywhere. That was wrong. I had not checked the old hosting server itself. It is still running, and it still holds the full-size originals.
What is recoverable
I checked all 378 share photos that are currently broken or too small against that server, one at a time:
| Photos | What the old server has |
|---|---|
| 112 | A properly sized original, ready to use as is. Real photographs, no enlarging. One is 200 by 300 on your site and 3817 by 5726 on the server. |
| 166 | The original is small too, so enlarging is the only route for these. |
| 100 | Not there either. Genuinely gone. |
129 in total have a strictly bigger original than what the site is using today.
The bigger prize is still unchecked
Another 577 pages have a photo that works but looks soft. I skipped those in this pass because they were not broken. If the same proportion holds, a good share of them also have a full-size original sitting on that server, which would take Bone Voyage from roughly 1 page in 10 with a crisp share picture to most of them.
How the recovery works
The site's domain points at Cloudflare now, so nothing reaches the old box by name any more. It still answers on its own network address though, and when asked directly it hands over the original files. No control panel, no exports, no temporary archives to clean up afterwards.
WordPress kept every upload alongside the smaller copies it generated for the page layout, so for a picture the site currently shows at 300 by 200 there is usually a full-size version in the same folder under a slightly shorter filename. That is what makes this a lookup rather than a hunt.
Two things had to be sorted out before any of this worked. The migration scripts could no longer log in, because the hosting panel had quietly renamed the link they depend on, and they were failing with an error that pointed nowhere near the real cause. That is fixed. And the file manager's own folder listing is unusable on these directories, since they hold thousands of files and it never finishes loading, which is why going straight to the files is the practical route.
Where the technical specifics live
The server address, the login details and the exact commands are deliberately not on this page. The password box above is a soft gate, so anything written here would still sit in the page's source. Those specifics are in the private project repo, in the migration folder, under a file named OLD‑HOST‑IMAGE‑RECOVERY.
What I would do, in order
- Pull the 112 real originals and repoint those pages. Sharp, genuine photographs, free.
- Run the same check across the 577 soft ones and pull whatever comes back bigger.
- Enlarge the 166 whose originals are small too. About 10 to 20 seconds each, runs on your own machine, costs nothing.
- Put the brand card on the 100 with nothing left to recover.
One and two come before three on purpose. Every real original found is one fewer softened, AI-enlarged photo on the site.
Do this part regardless of the share cards
That old server is the only remaining copy of these full-size photographs. The backup saved during the migration holds only the small versions the crawl happened to need, so it is not a substitute.
If the hosting ever lapses or that box is retired, the originals are gone permanently. A complete copy of the uploads folder belongs in cold storage, and that is worth doing whether or not you ever touch the share pictures.