How to Fix ‘Unable to create directory’ error when uploading image into WordPress

| June 2010 Posted in Tips & Tricks |

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I started getting this error [Unable to create directory /home/content/.../wp-content/uploads/2010/06. Is its parent directory writeable by the server?] For two reasons, 1. some times it would happy after a WordPress update, 2. if I moved my site from one hosting company to another or from one directory to another in a hosting account.

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The Solution

What you need to do is fix the upload path. This is the upload path /home/content/…/wp-content/uploads/2010/06 and it no longer is the right one for one of the two reasons above (that I know of).

Step 1:

You need to login to your hosting account and locate your hosting accounts main path, which starts like this, /home/content/…. and goes on (in most cases).

Step 2:

Login to your WordPress admin panel (yourdomain.com/wp-admin) then type /options.php to the end of yourdomain.com/wp-admin (yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options.php). This will display parts of your WordPress database and make it very easy for you to make changes in your WordPress dashboard.

Step 3:

Scroll down until you find upload_path

Step 4:

Delete the first part of the path listed there which looks something like this, /home/content/…/wp-content/uploads. Remove this portion /home/content/…/ and replace it with the path you found on in your hosting account in step 1.

Other option:

You can probably leave the upload file path like this wp-content/uploads and it will still work fine. What I have seen, is that in WordPress 3.0 it no longer uses the entire file path like it use to. This way you wont have to worry about any errors in the future. But if you try this option and it still does not work, then you will need to insert the whole file path.