WordPress Image upload error – Troubleshooting

Are you using WordPress for your blogs?

WordPress is an amazing CMS and publishing platform especially if your are into blogging. No Content Management Solution is as smooth and easy to use as WordPress and add to it the numerous functionality that WordPress offers and you have a killer tool to publish.

But it is not uncommon for any tool to get stuck up at times and that too at silly things and you then have a recipe for frustration. Most of the responses  for any such small issues and snags with WordPress can be found at their support center, but there are still some issues that you will not find an answer to.

If you are not a high investment blogger, you might not want to spend money on hiring a web developer just to resolve such issues. I have come across numerous such instances and that is where the thought of delving into troubleshooting steps and solutions to problems with WordPress came to my mind.

One such common problem that people encounter with their newly installed or, just upgraded blog is a problem with “image upload”. You might come across an error saying “Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads”/ The last line in this error will ask you to check the permissions of the parent folder in which you are uploading the image.

This is how you can resolve the problem.

First of all check if the uploads folder in your WordPress installation has a write permission. This is normally called as CHMOD in the Linux language. Your “upload” folder should have a permission 777. In order to do this just login to your ftp client and right click on your “upload” folder. Select “permissions” and enter 777 under CHMOD. Don’t forget to check the “recurse into sub-directories option” as well.

Once you have set the permissions for your “upload” directory, login to your WordPress blog’s dashboard. Go to “Miscellaneous” under the “settings” tab. Against the field saying, “Store uploads in this folder” enter “wp-content/uploads”. Note that there is “/” before “wp-content”. It is extremely important to remove this “slash”.

Now try uploading your images and things should be alright.

Don’t forget to tell me if this worked for you.