blog (non-profit animal sanctuary) images all disappeared

A few days ago, I was having a hard time uploading an image. The uploader acted like it was uploading the image but then the image would not appear. I worked around it by manually uploading the image elsewhere and linking to it. I didn’t think to look at past posts to see if their images were OK, just figured it was a problem with the uploader, which I know has given other folks fits in the past.

Today, I wrote another post and was unable to upload an image to use as the feature image. Or, rather, I could upload it, just couldn’t see it either in the draft or published post. When I clicked on the link for the image, I got a 403 permission denied message.

Then I noticed that all of our images are gone from pages and posts. (Header and sidebars are OK.)

I did go into the files on my server (Bluehost) and the pictures are still there in the “uploads” file within WP Content.

I did check, and the permissions for the uploads file is set at 755 as it should be. I did notice that the permissions for the individual images were different, 644 I think, but setting the permissions for one of them to 755 did not make that one appear.

I did turn off all plug-ins. No improvement. I also upgraded to the latest WordPress and deleted all inactive plug-ins.

I did check, and the settings check-box telling WordPress to organize images by date is not checked.

What else could there be for me to do?

The website is blog.bravebirds.org