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

Hosting WordPress

10 Comments

9 Comments

nixdminx, March 7, 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. )
Matt, March 8, 2009:

Glad this post was of assistance to you
Travis, March 19, 2009:

Thanks for the post. I also don’t know why WP doesn’t include this bit of info in their “moving wordpress” article.
Culinary Cory, April 15, 2009:

Dude! You totally just saved me a ton of headache. Thanks for writing this article. It was really helpful.
martin, May 6, 2009:

this has to be one of the most helpful articles ever on wordpress! thanks man… all the best
Trevor, May 7, 2009:

Thanks for the tip! This was really helpful, and definitely should be included in the codex article on Moving Wordpress.
Harry, May 28, 2009:

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.
Big D, November 23, 2009:

Thanks!! .. I couldn’t figure that out for nothing!!
Arto, December 10, 2009:

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…