Thread

I have an image manipulation preset defined in the file upload preferences, which should generate a thumbnail during upload but I continue to get this message:

Thumbnail could not be created for the image. Please make sure the thumbnail directory is writable.

The folder structure is this:
www/images/uploads/community/_thumbs
and images, uploads, community, and _thumbs have all been set to 777.

When I try to upload an image directly using the File Manager or synchronizing a directory I get the error.

I ran across this post http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/204577/ and it sounds like I could have written it myself, except I’m not running it on a webserver not a local machine.

Any suggestions?

Version 2.5.0 build date 20120507 (which we recently upgraded to, hoping to resolve this issue, but it didn’t fix it.)

Hey sararas,

This is pretty odd. I am sorry to hear you are running into this problem.

Is this on a windows based server? Do you know who owns the file? Is it Apache or a user?

Please let me know.

Cheers,

It’s a Linux based server. The owner of the folders is a user, but we added Apache to the admin group, which should allow it to write, I believe.

Hey sararas,

What do you mean by Admin Group? Do you mean a root like group that you have created?

Would you be able to, just to test, run as the Apache user or whatever your default Linux flavor likes to use? Or is this locked down in a certain way according to a company policy? This may not be the cause here, but when things are not running “out of the box” I need to explore what is different.

If you are able, /var/log/messages may have some hints to what is going on.Can you tail that when you try to sync? Look for an error?

I guess a better a better question, stepping back, is did this work before? Is this an update or a clean install? Any server changes.

Please let me know.

Thank you,

Hi Shane- thanks for your response.  As it turns out, GD (Graphics Draw) was not installed on the (php) server.  :/ :/ :/  But it is now, and everything works perfectly.  Hopefully this information can help someone in the future, as they’re going through their troubleshooting checklist.

Hey sararas,

Thank you for letting me know! Glad things are working again.

Cheers,