@joannagu, “internal server error” is a generic message. As the message says, maybe you can have more information about what happened looking at the server error log, so you have to ask your service provider for this.
You did well to download the plugin on your computer, because you can upgrade it via FTP – apart from investigate the cause of the issue (maybe a low php memory limit, or some other limit in your server configuration) – you don’t lose anything deactivating plugins, but there is no need to deactivate.
Upload via FTP the plugin files in the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, overwriting them.
Thank you for the help here @tizz 🙂 @joannagu , as @tizz pointed out, this internal server error may likely be due to a server configuration that is out of date or too low. Check what version of PHP & MySQL that you’re running and your memory_limit. This information can be found under Gallery > Overview if you can access your dashboard, or your php.ini file on your server. @tizz is also correct that it may be worth upgrading manually by overwriting the plugin files on your server with the updated .zip files, via FTP.
-Becky
Thank you both so much!
I will upload via ftp but I am curious in the meantime, here are the settings I found in Gallery> Overview and I am wondering if anything is awry in there. Please let me know.
Thanks!
Joanna
Operating System : Linux (32 Bit)
Server : Apache
Memory usage : 9.65 MByte
MYSQL Version : 5.0.96-log
SQL Mode : Not set
PHP Version : 5.3.24
PHP Safe Mode : Off
PHP Allow URL fopen : On
PHP Memory Limit : 268435456
PHP Max Upload Size : 32M
PHP Max Post Size : 33M
PCRE Backtracking Limit : 1000000
PHP Max Script Execute Time : N/As
PHP Exif support : Yes ( V1.4 )
PHP IPTC support : Yes
PHP XML support : Yes
Graphic Library
GD Version : bundled (2.0.34 compatible)
FreeType Support : Yes
FreeType Linkage : with freetype
T1Lib Support : No
GIF Read Support : Yes
GIF Create Support : Yes
JPEG Support : Yes
PNG Support : Yes
WBMP Support : Yes
XPM Support : No
XBM Support : Yes
JIS-mapped Japanese Font Support : No
No problem @joannagu – You could probably benefit from an upgrade in PHP & MySQL. You’re running v5.0 of MySQL and the latest version is v5.6, PHP we’re now at 5.6, though most WordPress friendly servers are running 5.5 at least. So I’d start there. Everything else looks OK 🙂
-Becky