Medium to Markdown or Markdown to Medium?

Which direction is less tedious?

3 min readFeb 8, 2024

I wrote before on how to convert Medium to Markdown. I showed some nice shortcuts using VSCode. But as I noted in the end, it’s still a tedious process.

One of the people who read the article asked me why I don’t do the opposite — write in Markdown and import it into Medium. And really, why not?

Import Story

Create the post in Markdown, and publish it
In Medium, go to Your Stories → Import a story.

3. Enter the link of your published post and press Import.

Fix story before publishing

Add missing elements

If your Jekyll theme, like mine, doesn’t have subtitles, then you need to add it. In addition, text dividers are not imported — you’ll need to manually add the Medium text divider.

No divider, and you can see the extra line as well (below)

Re-embed media

GIFs from Giphy etc. are not imported, so you’ll need to re-embed the GIFs in your Medium article.

Also, I need to copy and paste regular text into the caption area for images. My captions aren’t HTML captions — maybe if they were, I wouldn’t have to do this step (if anyone tries this and it works, I would love to hear it).

Copy and paste missing content

There are some elements that aren’t imported at all, such as code blocks.

Also, at the end of my articles, after a text divider, I have some additional info and links to my site etc. Medium removes this completely in favor of a simple Originally published at <link> on <date>. So you need to copy all your footer text if you have any.

Remove extra lines

Medium sometimes adds extra lines after titles (see first image). I have no idea why, maybe it could be prevented somehow? In any case, currently I’m deleting them manually.