isolated source for image upload problem

[ Moderator note: Title decapped. Don’t shout, it’s considered to be rude. ]

As many folks have had problems with uploading photos, I have found at least one source of where the problem lies and hopefully this will explain many others as well.

I am using version 3.8. When I first installed WP, created my pages, and upload photos I had no problems. This was in Nov 2013. WP creates new folders each new month – in my case 11 and 12 for 2013. Then it created 2014/01 and this is where my problem began where I could no longer upload images.

There are two ways to add images the media library. The FIRST option is to select media, add new and select files. The SECOND option is to select pages, all pages, and then select the page you want your image to go on and select “edit”. Once you selected the page, there is a tab to “add media”, so click on that and the media library comes up with images already loaded that you can choose from, or the option to upload an image.

I always used the SECOND option. All was fine until 2014/01 when I started getting the error messages. For advanced users, even when I FTP’d the ISP’s server and created a new uploads/2014/01 file directory so that the ownership of the directory was mine and not Apache’s, renamed the old uploads/2014/01 to uploadsold/2014/01 and tried to upload the image using the SECOND option described above, WP did not recognized the new directory I created and was still looking at the old one because all my pictures on the website were BLANK. This was confusing to me and to the ISP.

After much testing, we found that if you upload images using the FIRST option, there were no problems at all and the uploaded image goes into the proper month folder (01,02,03 ect) that WP creates for organization purposes.

It seems that the problem lies in the MEDIA UPLOADER through the PAGES. Something went wrong when the year changed – the Pages uploader keeps wanting to place all images in the 2014/01 directory, no matter what month it is. Also, it does not recognize a new directory named uploads when it is created – it is stuck on using the ORIGINAL 2014/01 folder in my case – this is probably a coding error and it seems that there may be several issues in this problem – permissions assignments, directory structure and others – all function calls react different ways on different versions of WP, Apache and other server software, but the common factor here may be the way folks are uploading the images. This may be the common denominator but no one had seen it yet – at least in all the posts I read…no one that I saw had mentioned HOW they were trying to upload the images –option 1 or option 2.

I am waiting for April 1st to come to see if there will be any problem with using the FIRST option with uploading images…I will let you folks know. Hope this helps!