January 10th, 2009
WordPress Uploading Not Working After Moving Host?
If you have moved to a different web host and uploading of various media such as pictures or video in WordPress stopped working then you had the same problem as me about 10 minutes ago.
What happened is I was trying to upload images to my last blog post when I kept getting errors to make sure that the permissions where set correctly on my uploads directory and that the folders were all writable. I then realized that after moving my hosting to MediaTemple my absolute path to my WordPress upload directory had changed.
So, to fix the problem you have to simply navigate to Settings >> Miscellaneous in your WordPress backend and then change the path to where your uploads folder is located. I really don’t understand why they didn’t put these options under the “Media” tab rather than “Miscellaneous”, but anyway…
If you don’t know what the absolute path to your WordPress directory is, it seems as if the relative path works just as well. So for instance, if your blog is hosted on your own domain, something like www.yourdomain.com, your relative path to your WordPress uploads directory would be something like this:
wp-content/uploads
and your absolute path would be something like this (on most web hosts, but not all):
/home/yourusername/wp-content/uploads
Once you change that option in your WordPress admin area, uploading should start working again 
12 Comments
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- Pingback: upload troubles. @ chad pfarr | 2009 on October 12, 2009
you have just solved a problem that my host can’t even answer – you are a total superstar. I changed to a hosted blog and had this headache over media so I was having to work round it and post images from urls and then blog my photos from flickr (at least I know how now!)However, one other tip is to check in your files if you have the right permissions to upload, which I did and I had to change them from the default. Thanks ever so much for sharing this as I have spent hours trying to find the answer to this issue.
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Glad this post was of assistance to you
Thanks for the post. I also don’t know why WP doesn’t include this bit of info in their “moving wordpress” article.
Dude! You totally just saved me a ton of headache. Thanks for writing this article. It was really helpful.
this has to be one of the most helpful articles ever on wordpress! thanks man… all the best
Thanks for the tip! This was really helpful, and definitely should be included in the codex article on Moving Wordpress.
Thanks pal! I was going nuts over this one. It hadn’t dawned on me that I had changed directories since I last uploaded images. I’m left to wonder how many other locations have that old folder name.
Thanks!! .. I couldn’t figure that out for nothing!!
What difference does it make when I add the relative path AND the absolute one? I see some message that the absolute one is optional…
Just a quick note. When I moved my Wordpress installation to a new folder, I edited the path in the Misc. folder to match the new path, but it never ended up working. I could upload, but the images wouldn’t display.
However, I was using the full path from the server root. I found that if I changed to the relative path ( starting the path with ../ instead of just a / ), that solved the problem completely.
Since I had only moved the blog to another folder on the same server, I should have been able to just change the folder name… not sure why it didn’t work that way!
- Matthew
Thanks! I thought it would have changed when updating database (as I updated to latest ver. of wordpress when moving to new host) but it was not.
Thank you. I don’t know why this isn’t mentioned more prominently in http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
(and there, only in the section about moving wordpress within your own site but not when moving to a new host).