Hmmm sometimes FTP clients will show that you are the owner of the file but it doesn’t explain to you that other users don’t have read / write permissions. So even if you changed something in the your footer.php another user (WordPress in this case) will not see it.
Did you change permissions or CHMOD your files lately?
If so you might have made you the Owner of everything and blocked WordPress from accessing your photos, footer and that explains why plugin updates don’t work.
How to fix
Login to your Server and you need to navigate to your WordPress folder
sudo CHOWN -R www-data:www-data /whateveryourwordpressfolder
This will make Apache (if you use Ubuntu) the owner of The WordPress folder which is what you want.
You’ll then want to update Permissions – so that groups and ‘others’ can read / execute your files
sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
– this fixes folder permissions
sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
– this fixes file permissions
see also my post http://wordpress.damien.co/2012/04/how-to-fix-your-wordpress-when-read-write-doesnt-work/