Issue of missing thumbnails in media library for Wordpress platform

Recently I shifted my business website AAC India from blogspot platform to a dedicated hosting service. Instead of designing and building individual pages, I decided to opt for Wordpress 3.4.2 platform as it offers a great CMS. Any changes made to permalinks or media library are reflected across the entire site making it easy to manage and maintain. This is a boon when you have lots of common images on your website. This way you don’t need to add a description or alt tags to your images every time you insert it in a post or a page.

Wordpress software can either be downloaded from www.wordpress.org and uploaded to your hosting service or directly installed through cpanel of your hosting service provider.

Once I had installed my wordpress CMS, I uploaded some pictures to the gallery. Once upload was finished, I was able to see all the uploaded files. But I could not to see any thumbnails. It was just showing that ‘torn’ icons denoting missing pictures.  I tried deleting them and uploading again, but there was no change. I went to my cpanel -> file manager and found uploads folder there. Uploads folder is located under wp-contents folder. Wp-content -> uploads. I tried changing permissions from 644 to 755. After changing permissions, I deleted all the files from media library and re-uploaded all the files. All I got was ‘torn’ icons. Again.

Changing permissions for uploads folder

Finally I deleted uploads folder from cpanel -> file manager. After deleting uploads folder, I created a new folder named uploads and set permissions to 755. I tried uploading couple of files and they showed up along with their thumbnails. Bingo! I was back in the game and moved ahead with building my wordpress based website.

Please note that wordpress media library will create separate folders according to dates (month-wise) in order to store uploaded files.

Folders created according to dates (month-wise)

This is how I resolved the issue of missing thumbnails in media library for wordpress platform.