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

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

Last updated: March 9, 2013




This article is a little outdated. Please check the updated version of the tutorial on how to fix the unable to create directory error.

This post has a textual and video instructions showing how to fix the WordPress “Unable to create directory” error when uploading/inserting image into WordPress.

I started getting the “Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads/2008/12. Is its parent directory writable by the server?” error when uploading or inserting image into a WordPress post just after upgrading to WordPress 2.7. First I thought it is a directory permission related error so I tried changing the permission of my ‘upload’ directory to 777 (which you shouldn’t have to do) but I was still having the same problem. After trying many things I was able to fix it using the following method.



  1. Log into your WordPress Admin account.
  2. Go to ‘Miscellaneous’ Settings options from the ‘Settings’ menu.
  3. In the Miscellaneous Settings put wp-content/uploads in the “Store uploads in this folder” text box.
  4. Save the Changes by hitting the “Save Changes” button and you are done.

Fix WordPress Image Upload Error: Video Instructions

Checkout the comments below for more tips.

If you have done everything explained here and it doesn’t help then it is most likely a server configuration issue. Contact your hosting provider and see if you can get help from them or look for a better hosting solution.

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Web Development Troubleshooting,  Video Tutorial,  Web Development,  web masters,  Wordpress

Reader Interactions

Comments (62 responses)

  1. Mergim says:
    October 15, 2011 at 6:07 am

    Oh very Very Thanks

  2. Online jewelry says:
    September 9, 2011 at 6:29 pm

    Thanks very much, you really helped me solve this problem.
    Two thumbs up for you…..

  3. devarshi says:
    March 10, 2011 at 8:18 pm

    Thanks alot. I searched plenty of other sites and nothing worked. But Your video fixed it in a min.!!!!.

  4. y8 says:
    March 10, 2011 at 3:31 am

    Thanks for giving me the useful information. I think I need it. Keep up your work. Thank you

  5. James Minh says:
    November 23, 2010 at 10:18 am

    Thank for your tips. I have the same problem and I thought it was my fault when moving my blog to a new hosting. But in my dashboard, I don’t see the ‘Miscellaneous’ Settings options from the ‘Settings’ menu.
    I still look for the way to solve my problem. I will try some methods suggested by some others commenter here in your blog.
    Thanks

  6. Acneend says:
    November 9, 2010 at 10:50 am

    It works like a charm! thanks

  7. End Acne says:
    November 9, 2010 at 10:48 am

    Thank for the tip, I have fixed the unable to create directory errors

  8. Eva says:
    October 27, 2010 at 7:54 pm

    Thanks Ryan from the post #34 !!!

    For me works the same!

    http://www.mydomain.com/wp-content/uploads

    ta-daaaah …

  9. John says:
    September 16, 2010 at 8:43 am

    I tried changing the permissions to 777, that didn’t work either….

    Simple fix – delete the wp-content/uploads directory, then create a new one with the same name. It works with permissions set to 755 and 775, so you don’t have to create a security hole by setting it to 777 😉

  10. Ivy says:
    September 15, 2010 at 12:42 am

    Hi, Your permissions should never be 777. This maybe why this is having an error many server block files using 777 permission as these are major security risks for your site. The permission for folders should be 755. You can read more about file permissions here:

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions

  11. ltheuma says:
    September 14, 2010 at 9:25 am

    i have installed 3.0.1, have changed to wp-content/uploads, permission is at 777 and still getting the same error

  12. aishwarya says:
    August 30, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    thanks! i had this problem ever since i migrated servers. nice work mate 🙂

  13. Ivy says:
    August 25, 2010 at 11:11 pm

    Hi Chris, It looks like these settings moved in WordPress 3.0. They are now located under “Media” in the “Setting Menu”.

  14. Chris says:
    August 25, 2010 at 12:26 pm

    Hello

    I have just installed word press 3.0.1 and am having the error message as above. It sounds silly but in word press 3.0.1 I cannot find Miscellaneous Settings under settings on my dash board.

    Does any one know where i can find miscellaneous settings to correct my upload problem.

    Regards

    Chris

  15. Leigh says:
    July 29, 2010 at 4:30 pm

    Thanks so much for this post! I recently moved hosts, and I was baffled at what could possibly be wrong. The path was the entire server path. Once I changed it as you said, everything worked perfectly again.

  16. agon says:
    July 12, 2010 at 6:18 pm

    there is another fixing trick…change the permission on the wp-content directory to 766, 777 or 767…when u upload the pic… then change it as it was 755…

  17. Troy says:
    July 4, 2010 at 1:12 pm

    Thanks. It worked perfectly!

  18. Ryan says:
    June 24, 2010 at 2:17 pm

    Just found the issue.

    Even though we are told to put in the
    relative path
    /wp-content/uploads

    it didn’t work.. what did was to put in your domain name before making it an absolute path

    such as
    http://www.mydomain.com/wp-content/uploads

    and ta-dah ..it worked!

  19. Jonny says:
    June 22, 2010 at 2:58 pm

    lifesaver, thanks.

  20. Ryan says:
    June 10, 2010 at 11:04 pm

    For those of you that get this error message after having a blog transferred to you, this fix works like a charm. Because sometimes when transferring it keeps the file path of the original owners server.

    Thanks for the quick and perfect fix!

  21. Morten Croatia says:
    June 10, 2010 at 10:01 am

    Thanks for small guide, it solved my problem (-:

    What it think is really strange, i have several pages on same template, by the same hoster, this problem only occored one my swedish page, the rest works with out this problem?

    Any this was one of the most easy problems to solve, thanks once again

    Morten

  22. Tim says:
    June 9, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    I had this problem and spent several hours reading posts about with no luck. My permissions were right and the upload folder path was correct.

    I realised that it was a SELinux issue for me. If you run SELinux then you will need to run the command below to allow apache (httpd) to execute particular PHP commands, including creating new files and folders. Here is the command:

    chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t

    Hope that helps someone else. This was driving me crazy and I was about ready to give up and uninstall WordPress. Glad it didn’t come to that.

  23. Custom Dog Tags says:
    May 31, 2010 at 9:27 am

    Thanks a lot. I have now solved the problem on my dog tags blog.

  24. admin says:
    May 19, 2010 at 7:13 am

    Did you check that the directory permissions are correct?

  25. Jordan says:
    May 19, 2010 at 3:03 am

    I have tried everything you walked through a number of times and am still getting the error message. Could be a problem with my server/host?

  26. Saef Reyad says:
    May 10, 2010 at 9:58 am

    ok i did it finally, thanks

  27. Saef Reyad says:
    May 10, 2010 at 9:45 am

    i did this but am still having the same problem, is there is anything else i can do.

    thanks

  28. Allin says:
    May 10, 2010 at 9:14 am

    Cheers. I had a full path of webspace/httpdocs/example.com/wp-content/uploads in the uploads box. restoring the default worked.

  29. Troy says:
    May 2, 2010 at 12:03 am

    Worked great for me, thanks for the help.

  30. admin says:
    April 23, 2010 at 7:30 pm

    No comment… LOL 🙂

  31. Glanzer says:
    April 23, 2010 at 11:59 am

    This didn’t work for me, but I now know why… I am building a site for someone and they’ve exceeded their 5 MB quota. Yes, someone opted for a plan that allows only 5MB of storage space.

  32. Patricia says:
    April 13, 2010 at 11:56 am

    Wish I had seen your post earlier – it worked like a charm and gosh so simple.

    I had seen a few other posts where they talked about changing the path in the the mySQL database and the phpmyadmin. Although I tried , I was confused as could be.

    I’m now a raving fan & will be following your blogs, tweets and everywhere else you are.
    You totally rock!

  33. Eric Transue says:
    March 30, 2010 at 2:48 pm

    Thank you for your help. Your tip fixed my issue.

  34. Abdul Cholik says:
    February 9, 2010 at 7:42 am

    Thank you very much for your tip.
    I have fixed my problem. May I post this article on my blog so that my friend could be able to ffix the same problem ? I’ll link my post to this article.
    Regards

  35. Recokiao says:
    January 25, 2010 at 6:52 pm

    Thanks, it was fast and is more secure, because, un other pages are saying to put your upload folder permisions on 777.

    Thanks again , the video is ok as it is.

  36. Luke Moujlton says:
    January 12, 2010 at 7:06 am

    Thanks heaps – that was doing my head in!

  37. Sarah says:
    January 6, 2010 at 4:54 pm

    Thanks, worked a treat!

  38. admin says:
    December 7, 2009 at 4:27 am

    Thanks for clarifying that up

  39. Tuba says:
    December 7, 2009 at 12:34 am

    Thank you for your guide. Actually just to be more clear:

    Under step 3:
    “Miscellaneous Settings put wp-content/uploads in the “Store uploads in this folder” text box.”

    Meaning replace the whole content of that field… instead of the anything there like /home/user/yorusete/wp-content/uploads

    Thanks for your help!

  40. Marcus says:
    October 19, 2009 at 8:31 am

    Awesome. I knew all about the file permission stuff (and they wouldn’t fix it), but by changing the upload path worked. Really sneaky error.

    Thanks for helping out.
    -M

  41. raj says:
    October 14, 2009 at 10:11 am

    sir i em also facing the same problem

    i saw your tutorial video and do setting accordingly but still facing the same problem
    so plz tell me the other solution

  42. Steve Fisher says:
    September 20, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    Thanks! The resetting permissions made me feel uneasy.

    This was a simple reset because the install put a long string rooted to the shared server which of course wouldn’t give permission.

    -Steve

  43. sergee says:
    September 6, 2009 at 3:39 am

    If you tryed everything and upload in your wordpress still doesn’t work – i have an answer for you. In short: php safe mode won’t let you create files or directories if your php scripts and upload directory belongs to different users. So there are 2 possible solutions: either disable php safemode (not recommended), or change an owner of scripts and upload directory:

    cd blog_root
    chown -R apache:apache *

    Complete description available here: http://tamkovich.com/2009/09/unable-to-create-directory-wp-content-uploads-is-its-parent-directory-writable-by-the-server/ (in Russian)

  44. itamar says:
    September 5, 2009 at 7:11 pm

    Thank you so much for this!
    I was running mamp on my laptop and this was doing my head in!
    resolved now thanks to your post!

  45. ryanel says:
    July 1, 2009 at 1:27 am

    go to option,general, look for the temp folder. and guide to the temp folder or where u want to put the temporary loads.

  46. Chin says:
    April 23, 2009 at 1:37 am

    As I have installed the WordPress in the 1click installer / Fantastico Installer the path was complete from root to this folder.

    When I changed to default value (wp-content/uploads), Its works fine.

    Thanks a lot to Tips and Tricks.

  47. Werner says:
    March 27, 2009 at 2:15 pm

    I went to the miscellaneous settings and saw that my upload path was wrong. Thank you so much for your help.

  48. admin says:
    March 25, 2009 at 10:14 pm

    What sort of error do you get?

  49. John says:
    March 24, 2009 at 6:06 pm

    I’ve tried this – still doesn’t work. Still haven’t found the problem.

  50. adedip says:
    January 5, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    the video is quite hard to understand..I can’t read anything..but a part from this..this is almost the default solution..it does help only the rookies..there’s something wrong in the 2.7 core code…
    and I still can’t figure out what!
    May help to know..that for me happens only if I use the sub-folder (year/month) organization..otherwise it works!

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