Images showing up under wrong month in Media Library

  • I have a wordpress site with around 9,000 images in the media library, so I use the “sort by date” function to find images more easily.

    The problem is, there is one month that only shows a few of the images that are supposed to be in it. If I go into the uploads folder via FTP, under uploads/2013/10, there are about 100 photos, but if I go to the media library under October 2013, only a few show up.

    Even more odd is that I’ve found some images from October 2013 under other dates in the media library. I’m not sure if all of the images from October 2013 are in the media library in random spots, or if it’s just those few.

    When I place one of the October 2013 images in a page, then view it in the browser and view the details of that image, it confirms that the image is located on the server in uploads/2013/10.

    None of the other months seem to have this problem. I don’t know if this is relevant, but the month that has this problem happens to be the oldest month of images.

    This makes it very difficult to find images in the media library. Why aren’t the images not showing in their proper date in the media library? How might I go about finding or fixing the problem?

    Thanks in advance.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Usually when you create a page or post in WordPress, media uploaded in that page or post will go into the folder from the month and year the page/post was originally created in.

    So, if most of your pages were initially created in October 2013 (which makes sense if that’s when your site launched), then any images you upload to those pages would go into the /2013/10/ folder.

    Does that help clarify the issue?

    Thread Starter t4gal

    (@t4gal)

    Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, it doesn’t clarify the issue. Perhaps my wording was unclear.

    I realize that what you’ve described is the proper behavior, however my media library is not displaying that behavior. Instead, images that were uploaded in October, 2013, which are in the 2013/10 folder on the server, are displaying in random sections of the media library, not the October 2013 section as they should be. For example, one particular image which was uploaded in October 2013 displays under July 2015 instead, even though I’ve confirmed that it is in the 2013/10 folder on the server. Does that make sense?

    Thanks

    I see, I think I misread the initial post. That is a strange problem. Has the site moved to a different server or have you used any plugins that let you replace media files with new versions?

    Thread Starter t4gal

    (@t4gal)

    The site hasn’t moved to a new server. The only plugin that messes with media files would be WP Smush, which is an image compression plugin. However that plugin has been used on all of the images on the site, so it seems odd that it would only cause problems with one folder of images. Although I realize nothing is impossible.

    It may very well be possible that the plugin could change the modified date on the file, which then changes the sorting in your media library.

    Might be interesting to see if there are multiple copies of a file in the library?

    Thread Starter t4gal

    (@t4gal)

    I’m not even sure how I would go about finding that out. With over 9,000 images in the library and no other way to search for images (that I know of? The search feature in the media library seems to be utterly useless in my experience.) it’s almost impossible to find duplicates. The only way I found out the images were displaying under different dates was by happening to stumble upon one that I knew shouldn’t have been there.

    If you were to search by part of the file name or even the title (if one is assigned), I think that would help.

    Thread Starter t4gal

    (@t4gal)

    Searching by file name would be ideal, unfortunately it doesn’t work. The only thing I’ve found that seems to actually work with the search function is searching for the image title, or the title of the post that the image is attached to. Neither of which are helpful in my particular situation, as the images I need to find usually do not have a title and are never attached to a post.

    Even searching for the exact file name brings up no results. I’ve tested this by copying and searching for the file name of the newest image in the media library. (so that I can be certain the image actually is in the library, and certain that the file name is correct.)

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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