bugs and not able to upload with nextgen gallery

Hi there,
I have been running into the cookie log-in issue and then also into an error message upon log-in stating that the server was doing maintenance (which it didn’t and upon trying again it worked).
My main issue is that nextgen gallery won’t upload any images. (upload complete. zero images were uploaded)
On the permalinks page it says that my .htaccess is NOT writable which is odd to me since I use BPS security and that plugin states that my .htaccess is writable?!?
Overall it just seems that there are a bunch of things that seem out of order. I did try deactivating plugins and that didn’t change anything.

Now, would it make sense to completely re-install everything to try to “reset”? I am a photographer and I can not have my site down for an extended period of time.
Or does anyone have any input on fixing nextgen gallery so I can upload images again (this is mainly what I need to fix)?

Thank you!