Media Library Suddenly has Empty Thumbnails

  • Hello, I would greatly appreciate any help. I’m in a bit of a panic. I logged into one of my client’s sites today, and suddenly couldn’t upload any images. The image would upload, but give me a blank white thumbnail. I looked in the folder via FTP, and the file is indeed there but it’s not showing up in WordPress. After some googling, I found the setting under Media to change where the uploaded files go and started tinkering with that. Well, then poof! All of my thumbnails disappeared, a large amount of images on my site disappeared, and the option to edit the location of the media folder has disappeared! Here’s what I’ve done:
    -Deactivated the plugins folder
    -Switched to the default theme
    -Logged out, restarted, cleared browser cache, logged back in
    -Reinstalled WordPress
    I know somewhere along the line something got messed up, and WordPress is not pointing to my upload directory, but what’s strange is that some of the images are showing up. I don’t have a lot of technical knowledge when it comes to WordPress, so I’m completely baffled on what to do next. Please help! I’m happy to provide any additional info to make this easier to figure out. Here’s the link to my site.

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  • Thread Starter nvictory

    (@nvictory)

    I fixed it! In case anyone else has this issue, it was rather simple. I wish I could’ve saved an entire day of panic and pulling out my hair. The site is hosted with GoDaddy, and the very first thing I did was call them, and as soon as I mentioned WordPress, they informed me they couldn’t help me. I did, however, SPECIFICALLY ask them to check if there was a permissions problem. They said, no, that everything was fine on their end and that it was a WordPress problem. Well, as a last ditch effort, I started playing around with the permissions and all of the sudden my images are back. What a pain! Hope this helps someone else.

    Thanks nvictory,

    This is helpful to future readers. My thumbnails are also blank but it was restored from a backup of the site.

    I don’t know if my problem is related, but godaddy is hosting our WP website. We are not proficient in WP, barely learning. We just got our site published Oct 18 after working on it for several months. We have lots of images in the media library. After the site went live I was looking for an image to post to a blog and noticed many blank images in the media library(about 10%). In the details, these images have all the descriptions, file dimensions, etc – only thing missing is filesize. Many of these are on the live website pages and show an outline, but no image. They have been fine while we were working on the site, but I don’t know when or why they changed/corrupted? At godaddy suggestion I restored back to Oct 17 (before the migration from temp url to perm url), but no change. 4 different GoDaddy techs tried a number of fixes, but nothing has worked. We are starting to delete and reinstall images now, but trying to find the source of the problem. All of the affected images so far have been JPEG or JPG, but most of our JPEG and JPG files are still fine. Godaddy suggested recreating the files as PNG and reinstalling. The godaddy techs said they had never heard of this sort of issue – could it be a godaddy problem? Our site is https://www.earthwiseagriculture.net.

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