Locally installed WordPress – media library problems

Seems like almost all media uploader problems are permissions related. Exactly what happens when you upload? What kind of server do you have?

… when manually putting files in the designated map.

If you mean that you are putting files in the ‘uploads’ directory, that isn’t going to work. You have to upload via the media uploader to get the right DB entries or the media library won’t recognize the images (or write your own script that inserts those DB entries with or without the built in WP functions).

Okay, but when operating locally do you have to deal with permissions? That seems strange…

Yes. You always have to deal with permissions. Both Mac and Windows kinda hide this fact, though less so than they used to actually.

Ok. Here is how this works. Your web server is a user and has a username, even if you don’t know what it is. That user (the web server) has to have permission to write files to the /uploads/ directory or the media uploader will fail in exactly the way you describe. I don’t know if XAMPP has any internal permissions tools but if you browse to the uploads directory in the Finder you should be able to right click on the folder, choose, ‘Get Info’, and find an ‘Ownership and Permissions’ menu. You can set everything to ‘Read and Write’ and that probably won’t hurt anything so long as no one can connect to your web server from outside your LAN– so long as no one can connect from the internet, in other words. You never want to do that to a web accessible server. You probably want to hit ‘Apply to Enclosed Items’ also. The more security conscious way to do it would be to work out what group the server runs under, switch the folder’s group to match the web server’s group and then apply write permissions for the group only.