Images aren’t being generated

If your post published successfully but the featured image or body images didn’t appear, work through this page in order. The most common cause lives in Step 1 — it’s an environment issue rather than anything wrong with your campaign.

Before you start

Open Tools → Site Health in WordPress. Structura adds three probes there that light up when the most common image-generation blockers are present:

MySQL packet size is sufficient for background tasks
WordPress cron is enabled
WordPress uploads directory is writable

If any of those are flagged red or yellow, fix that first — the steps below spell out each fix.

Step 1: Is MySQL’s `max_allowed_packet` too small?

This is the single most common cause we see on shared hosting.

What’s happening. Structura queues image-generation jobs using Action Scheduler , which stores each queued job in the wp_actionscheduler_actions table. If the serialized job data is larger than MySQL’s max_allowed_packet setting, the database silently rejects the row. No PHP error, no error in the admin. The job is simply never created — so the image never generates.

Structura 1.17+ catches this at enqueue time and logs an error in Structura → System Logs with the step VISUALS. The message looks like:

Featured image task could not be enqueued. Action Scheduler refused the write — this is usually a MySQL packet-size limit (max_allowed_packet) or a database-write failure on wp_actionscheduler_actions.

How to fix it. You need to raise max_allowed_packet to at least 4 MB (4194304). How you do that depends on your host:

Shared hosting (Hostinger, SiteGround, Bluehost, etc.) — open a support ticket asking them to raise max_allowed_packet on your database to 4 MB or larger. Most hosts will do this within a few hours; it’s a common request.
Managed WordPress (Kinsta, WP Engine, Pressable) — your host has already set a reasonable value. If Site Health still flags this, open a support ticket and include a screenshot of the Site Health card.
VPS / self-managed — add max_allowed_packet = 16M under [mysqld] in /etc/mysql/my.cnf (or the equivalent on your MySQL / MariaDB install) and restart the database service.

After the change takes effect, run a campaign again or click Generate image on any Structura-generated post’s edit screen — the image should now save correctly.

Step 2: Is WordPress cron disabled?

What’s happening. If your wp-config.php includes define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true); and there’s no system cron hitting wp-cron.php, background image-generation jobs are queued but never run.

How to fix it. Either:

Remove the DISABLE_WP_CRON constant from wp-config.php, or
Add a server-side cron that calls wp-cron.php every minute:


* * * * * wget -q -O - https://your-site.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

Most managed hosts handle this for you. On shared hosting you may need to set the cron job yourself in your hosting panel.

Step 3: Is the uploads directory writable?

What’s happening. Generated images are imported via WordPress’s media_handle_sideload() helper, which writes to wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/. If that directory (or its parent) isn’t writable by PHP, the sideload fails. Site Health surfaces the exact WordPress error message.

How to fix it. Make the uploads directory writable by the web server. The typical fix on Linux hosts:


chown -R www-data:www-data wp-content/uploads
chmod -R 755 wp-content/uploads

Adjust the user (www-data, apache, nobody, etc.) to match your host’s web server user.

Step 4: Is the image provider configured correctly?

If none of the environment checks above flagged an issue, the problem may be provider-side.

Open Structura → Settings → AI Engine.
Confirm your Image provider is connected (green check).
If you’re on the Free or Pro plan (BYOK), confirm the provider you selected is image-capable. Claude produces text only — if you selected Claude for images, Structura will skip image generation silently on BYOK plans (on managed plans we substitute an image-capable provider automatically).

See AI settings for a full tour.

Step 5: Still stuck?

Open Structura → System Logs and filter to Step = VISUALS and Level = Error or Warning. The log line usually names the exact failure — copy the message into a support ticket along with:

Your plan tier
Your configured image provider
The campaign name
A screenshot of Tools → Site Health

Contact support.