Thumbnail images broken

I have been beating my head trying to figure out why thumbnails would not show up using Timthumb.

I tried loading the URL of the thumbnail in a browser window (basically the path to the Timthumb script with the image URL and dimensions as arguments) and kept getting 404 errors.

Google searches for Timthumb and 404 sent me down the wrong path of checking permissions etc, so I am posting my solution here in case anyone else gets stuck.

What I noticed is that the YouTube SimpleGallery plugin uses get_bloginfo('url') to create the URL for the Timthumb script.

In my case this was different from my “WordPress URL” in my dashboard settings. WordPress URL being the base of the WP installation.

So instead of http://mydomain.com/wpress/wp-content/plugins/youtube-simplegallery/scripts/timthumb.php it was http://mydomain.com/wp-content/plugins/youtube-simplegallery/scripts/timthumb.php. The difference is so slight that I didn’t catch it, but yup, that would be a 404.

Changing get_bloginfo('url') to site_url() in the plugin fixed this for me.

I edited shortcode.php. I believe in two places: one block handling YouTube videos and another handling Vimeo. Just wanted to confirm that it solved the problem for me, sorry if that doesn’t address your situation.

There have been updates to the plugin since the original post. I was hoping that this fix might get incorporated into the updates. I haven’t checked recently; from what you’re saying it doesn’t sound like it. Maybe there is a reason for using get_bloginfo(). Otherwise this case doesn’t seem like it would be uncommon.