As your questions meet mine, I'd like to add an aspect to your topic: there's a `raw` access to a post, for example, <https://meta.discourse.org/raw/90474/1> gives a Markdown version of this topic's introduction (resp. [`/2`](https://meta.discourse.org/raw/90474/2) would give this one.)

Now when images are uploaded they appear as something like: `[foo|325x210](upload://some-hash-reference)`. This would certainly refer to a hash in the database, which would thus be made available upon import to a new Discourse instance. But such links are of no use for external use, e.g., compiling posts for display elsewhere. In this case, the `raw` version of a post with embedded images would simply give a broken image -- or a broken link if a manual link were made with, e.g., `[bar](/t/some-topic-slug/123/45)`.

So an additional question would be -- if relevant to this topic:

- how to control "link export", i.e., links not used for internal purpose, but that would work from an external site? (Sometimes it's easier to search and replace the domain name than rework all links, especially when they don't follow a consistent structure.)