uploaded images not going to /uploads folder

Question

having a huge problem with a site. i updated the theme to use post thumbnails (that's how old it is) and then when trying to upload an image to use as featured thumbnail: the images process/crunch but then the URLs result in 404s.

there isn't anything abnormal in the site's .htaccess. there actually wasn't a wp-content/uploads directory so i made one and the chmod permissions are 0755, so that shouldn't be the issue. i reset the media settings folder to be the default but no images are ending up in that folder.

edit: changing the uploads folder to 0777 permissions seems to resolve this. is it safe to leave the permissions this way?

Answer 1

If I remember it right, this happened to me once. I deleted my /uploads directory (to delete all the images) and went back to posting thinking that WordPress will automatically create an /uploads directory and any necessary sub-directories for me.

And yes, that's how it works. But here's the catch -- WordPress doesn't set proper permissions for the /uploads directory and the directories within, this time. The new chmod permissions were like 0700.

SOLUTION: What I did was, I set back the permissions for /uploads directory at 0755, and selected the option in my FTP client to set the permission recursively to all sub-directories in the /uploads directory.

As in your case, I would also check the permissions on /wp-content directory.