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How I Changed My WordPress Image Upload Folder

By Jeremy Blake on May 9, 2011 9 Comments

Damn this bothered me for a long time. The default image upload folder is some crap like wp-content/uploads/date/blabla/finally-your-image.jpg. I’ve always been a fan of just having my images in the mydomain.com/images/ folder. I do it for seo, so that the spiders don’t have to search so deep for the images on my site. I’m not really sure if it helps anything, but it seems like a lot of the images from my websites do show up under a lot of the google image searches, so I just might be on to something.

There seems to be quadrillions of dead-end threads out there (especially on the wordpress forums, which I hate), and some people seem to have it figured out, but most everyone doesn’t. Hopefully this helps you if your’e trying to change the upload folder. I’ll show you what my settings look like.

Custom image upload folder

What I did was went in to my cpanel and found the actual path on my server to my website. It’s something like /home/myusername/public_html/images.

I then plugged in that URL into the “store uploads in this folder” box under Settings > Media > Uploading Files . . .

Then, just add the full path to the folder you want to upload the images in to in the “Full URL path to files” box. This just happens to be http://eliteeternity.com/images on this server.

If all else fails, ask your host what the server path to your website is, they should be able to help you if they know anything.

This made my day a bit better, hope it helps you out.

Now, hopefully this post kicks all of those dead-end threads in the ass in the search results so that you can find it.

About Jeremy Blake

Jeremy is a self-proclaimed socially-awkward penguin living in Utah. He makes money online. As he sleeps.

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  • Meera

    Thank you! Thank You! It solved all my problems in a jiffy! Had been searching the message boards for 15mins before I found your lifesaver post.

  • http://www.dailymorningcoffee.com Praveen Rajarao

    Awesome, just what i was looking for. Thanks for posting.

  • Z_ahed

    Thank you so much. I have been trying so many different things from wordpress forums and nothing was working. This works so well. Thanks a million.

  • Todd

    For “Store uploads in this folder” I used a RELATIVE path, and it worked. So I have “../uploads” instead of my full server path, which is easier and more portable.

  • Jward

    I’m new to WP – if I make this change on an exiting site will that throw out all the links/attchments to existing uploaded images/docs
    Thanks Joan

    • John Wolf

      Yes, those links will become broken. You would have to change them to match the new file location. If you have a massive site with tons of content I wouldn’t bother… This is something you would want to do in the beginning stages.

    • http://threshold-zero.com/cblog captainskyhawk

      You should be able to move the entire contents of the wp-content/uploads to your new folder, either through your site’s FTP section, or directly from your server’s command line (if you access to such a thing).

  • Laurie Bergren

    OMG, finally a real answer! Trying to change that folder has been driving me CRAZY! Thank you so much for posting this. Totally agree about the dead ends and lack of reliable info in the WP forums. Sad to say, but it’s true. Thanks again!

  • Hugo

    wahoooo! a real answer! totally agree with your first paragraph – just been through exactly that till i found your article. THANK YOU!!!