I am currently running Apache and PHP on Ubuntu. I have a page where a user is supposed to upload a profile image. The action on the backend is supposed to work like this: Upload file to user directory -- WORKS! Refer to the uploaded file and create a thumbnail in directory thumbs -- DOES NOT WORK www-data has write access to directory thumbs. My guess is that www-data for some reason does not have proper access to the file that was uploaded. UPLOADED FILE PERMISSIONS -rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data 47057 Feb 8 23:24 0181c6e0973eb19cb0d98521a6fe1d9e71cd6daa.jpg THUMBS DIRECTORY PERMISSIONS drwxr-sr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Feb 8 23:23 thumbs Im at lost here. I'm new to Ubuntu as well. Any help would be greatly appreciated!