WordPress Unable to create directory uploads/20../.. and can’t upload new images.

Unable to create directory uploads/2021/07.

I was trying to upload some new images but got the above error message. I checked the directory permissions and they were fine. I then manually created the directory and still got the same error message.

Tracking down the root cause

My hosting provider, Siteground provide a log file called php_errorlog in the sites root directory. Looking at this I could see that it was also reporting that the directory could not be created. However looking carefully at the message the path to the directory wasn’t right.

I think Siteground whilst migrating the site from CPanel to their new SiteTools had failed to update one of the settings.

Fixing the Unable to create directory uploads/2021/07

I added the following line into the wp-config.php file

define( ‘UPLOADS’, ‘wp-content/uploads’ );

And, just like that, the problem was fixed and uploads started working again.