Having trouble posting pictures to your WordPress blog from Windows Live Writer?
If you are getting an error in Windows Live Writer when trying to publish a post with pictures that says something like "The following pictures cannot be published because the blog does not support picture publishing." you aren’t alone.
I’ve been using Windows Live Writer for a long time now to help publish posts to many of my own blogs and to the blogs of my freelance writing clients. Until very recently, I never had any trouble publishing graphics by using Windows Live Writer. But, all of the sudden, it says it can’t publish my pictures and that I should configure an FTP account for picture publishing. What the –?
I’m not 100% sure what happened, but the issue raised its head shortly after WordPress upgraded to version 2.8. Ever since then, I have had strange issues here and there with my WordPress blogs. All of these issues relate to WordPress path errors that are set for everything from plug-ins to backup your WordPress database, to anything else that requires a path, including – you guessed it, uploading pictures.
On your WordPress blog’s control panel, under Settings is the menu item, Miscellaneous. Click on it and you will see that there is a field there that defines the path that pictures are uploaded to for your blog. If you are hosted on certain types of UNIX servers, like those on Dreamhost, that path may include a directory name that starts with a period. That is the problem
I don’t know whether the WordPress code has been changed such that it can no longer recognize directories that have a period at the beginning of their name, or if the code was changed so that it got more details regarding the paths so that now it sees the .whatever directories where it didn’t before. All I know, is that I have run a dozen or more blogs the same way for over a year without ever running into this issue, and now, I’m troubleshooting all kinds of little problems that all come down to having that directory with the dot in front as part of the path somewhere.
To fix the problem with Windows Live Writer uploading pictures to your WordPress blog, delete the directory with the period, or just use a relative path instead. In other words, if the path listed is /server/.weasels/home/blog/wp-content/uploads/ then change it to just /wp-content/uploads/
With the offending dot-whatever named directory gone, Windows Live Writer should start working like its old self again, and you won’t have to configure an FTP account for picture publishing.