Note: Not an employee of Magento... for a previous reply
Good question. Not one that I can divine since I'm not the Great Carnac the Magnificent. I've tried waving the envelopes in front of my brow but keep coming up with "Variable Undefined, Call to a member function on a non-object".
I have no problem with making image files "group" writable (for example my current preferred hosting provider runs PHP with group privileges so it's more or less necessary), but I definitely question the wisdom of making them writable for "others". Why not 664 / 775?
I'll share with the team, thanks for the feedback @tty0.
Thank you so much!!! problem solved!
This is not working for me. I've updated the directory permissions to 755 but not able to load images in the admin under Products section.