WordPress 2.9.2 Image Upload Issue – Broken Images

Posted by John on Apr 25, 2010 in Blog, Support | 6 comments

For the better part of a day I’ve been trying to investigate and resolve a new issue that has popped up in my WordPress installation.

Apparently out of nowhere, the image upload function within a posting is not functioning properly.  When I click in the image upload icon, select the image file (any type of image file), and let the “Crunching” process occur, the standard WP preview page appears with the image details, except no image:

After checking the various WordPress forum pages, I came across one page that seemed to be heading in the right direction: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/355923?replies=20

The most direct advice was to change the file permissions on the wp-content and wp-content/uploads folders, upload a file, and change it back to original permissions.

Tried this:

Per the forum page, I changed the permissions from 751 to 777 and then back.  Tried uploading again in between the change back and afterwards, but I still end up with the same broken image when attempting to upload.

I’ve gone down the path of trying to deactivate all of my plugins to see if that was the issue, that still has not resolved the problem.

Going to continue my investigation.  Awaiting a solution…

RESOLUTION

Alas, after surfing mutiple forums and trying the same solutions again, I finally stumbled upon a recommendation of changing the permissions of the wp-content/uploads directory from 751 (default) to 777 and then back to 755.  The important piece was to make this change recurse into the subdirectories, and apply to directories only (see those options above in the image of the permissions menu from within Filezilla).

Now, I don’t know if you really need to change from 751 to 777 or you could just try going directly to 755 and having that recurse in the sub-directories, but this actually worked.  Immediately following this change I was able to start uploading images into pages/posts again.

Additionally, I experienced the exact same issue on another WordPress site that I maintain and this solution worked for a second time.  Again, I don’t know the technical reasons for this (although I have a sneaking suspicion that Network Solutions is the culprit), but it worked.

Hope this helps!