I moved a few files around on my server the other day including moving the contents of my blog to a subdirectory on my main hosting account. Everything went fine as planned, but interestingly after I did this, I was unable to upload images properly while crafting new posts.
It was totally unexplainable because all the current images were working fine. Although there were plenty of people reporting the same issue about not being able to upload images properly in posts there wasn’t many suggestions of what to do about it around the web.
The Cause
For me, the issue was when I uploaded an image, it would just come up with a blank image box even though the image looked as though it was being uploaded properly.
After a bit of detective work I discovered that when you setup WordPress on Bluehost, Godaddy or any other number of hosts using an easy scripted installation (like Fantastico or Simple Scripts), the default directory for user uploads is actually a direct path to the directory on the server.
In my case I moved the location of my wp-content directory to another directory and this direct path changed. Nothing else on my blog was altered because they don’t refer to the direct path (luckily) so other than not being able to upload images, the properly was fairly unexplainable.
The Fix
The fix I eventually figured out for this is very simple.
Goto your Administration Dashboard on your WordPress site. Under the Settings menu click on the Miscellaneous menu item.
The default for the “Store uploads in this folder” box is usually wp-content/uploads. As I mentioned before, this is usually changed to the direct path on your server when you use one of the easy installation options your host provides like Fantastico or Simple Scripts.
Make sure you set this back to “wp-content/uploads” (or wherever it is you’ve specified as your upload directory).
Resolved!
Go back to the post you were trying to upload your image into and hopefully the issue should be resolved!
Still not working?
If it’s still not working, the next step would be to lodge a post on the support forums for WordPress or contact your host.
[...] which will affect how files and images are stored. Read more about this in the article “Fix For Not Being Able To Upload Images Properly In WordPress” by Josh [...]