Media Library and Header Image Won’t Work

Have you tried:

– deactivating all plugins to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s).

– switching to the default theme to rule out any theme-specific problems.

– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin. Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems.

– re-uploading all files & folders – except the wp-content folder and wp-config.php & root .htaccess files – from a fresh download of WordPress. Make sure that you delete the old copies of files & folder before uploading the new ones.

I will begin to follow these steps. I had hoped for a quick remedy after seeing other posts around the web saying that this was a commonly experienced problem under version 4.4. I figured that at some time I was running 4.4 but graduated to 4.6.1 and wondered if the “known bug” had been fixed yet.

You debug steps are excellent and I will follow them. When you say “resetting the plugins folder” do you mean to empty it and start over by installing my plugins? That is if deactivating and reactivating my plugins doesn’t uncover a cuprit?

BTW, I have tried reinstalling 4.6.1 but wonder if it would be better to first delete all files and folders except wp-content and wp-config.php as you recommend then to reinstall.

I should add that I am trying to fix this while keeping the site up and running if at all possible.

Besides it being a purely media problem, I have determined that when I do change images in Customize (be they header images, logo or sliders) then Save and Publish, when I try then to leave Customize I am presented with the Leave or Stay dialog as I would if I had not saved at all. No wonder my changes do not end up being in my web site me thinks.

I have performed all suggested steps and still no luck.

I think I should limit the symptom we’re trying to shoot to just the hopefully simpler one that the Media Gallery won’t display it’s “grid view”. List view seems to display but not grid view. Grid view just spins forever. I have the suspicion that if I got to the bottom of this problem, the rest of my image problems might behave.

In fact if you were to google “wordpress media grid view not working” or “wordpress media library loading forever”, you would see this same complaint from many, many users.

I haven’t come across a recipe for resolution. It looks like folk have had this problems since 4.0 and even 4.0.1 was said to fix it:
Version 4.0.1 also fixes some smaller bugs:

Stability improvements to the media gallery grid view.
Bug description: Some users experienced problems with the grid view in the media library – images where not shown in these cases while images were displayed in media library using list view without issues.

I would like to think that in 4.6.1 I would have no issues. Another thing bothers me is that I read about folder and file permission problems within w/-content/uploads. I saw that mine were 775 and 666 where 755 and 644 was preferred. So my reinstall of wordpress while saving my wp-content did fix this but I tried changing the permissions by hand/cpanel. No effect.

I want to report for other having such as issue that I have finally resolved mine. After 3 months of of trying to fix it on my own as well as seeking help here on this forum (without success), I finally broke down and asked my web host support for assistance (without expecting much). Low and behold, within hours, the replied with a suggestion to add a new Allow ip-address to my .htaccess file and it worked. My media library grid view worked again and this fixed my problems setting my theme’s header image as well as posting posts with images. I admit not knowing too much about the htaccess and why it had such an impact but I can finally start moving forward after being stuck and almost out of business. Maybe this might help others who have run into a problem with a broken media library.