Unlink path not working after adding a folder - php

Question

I save the path to my images in my database. To delete these images, I get the path from the database.
This worked fine, until I added two folders to the path.
So far the path in my database looked like this (working!):
/var/www/myproject/public/images/550d744bd91d16.7869
Now, it looks like this (not working!): /var/www/myproject/public/images/5/profile/550d744bd91d16.7869
My Code
$folder_name = /var/www/myproject/public/images/ . $_GET['user_id'] . '/';
$profile_folder = $folder_name . 'profile/';
chmod($folder_name, 0777);
chmod($profile_folder, 0777);
// Get the images file path
$database = DatabaseFactory::getFactory()->getConnection();
$query = $database->prepare("SELECT image_path FROM images WHERE image_id = :image_id AND user_id = :user_id LIMIT 1");
$query->execute(array(':image_id' => $image_id, ':user_id' => Session::get('user_id')));
$img_path = $query->fetch();
// Convert array to string
$path = $img_path->image_path;
$file = $path . '.jpg';
if (file_exists($file)) {
// Delete the image file on the server
unlink($file);
} else {
echo 'An error occured';
return false;
}
What I tried so far
The path is definitely correct. I triple checked in the database and outputted the variable multiple times.
Therefore, I thought it must be the directory permissions, however, I added the permissions to the code and nothing changed.
I am not getting any error message and I would be beyond thankful for any kind of help with this!
Summary
file_exists(unlink($file)) returns FALSE.
unlink($file) returns TRUE.
The file permissions:
images drwxrwxrwx
5 drwxrwxrwx
profile drwxrwxrwx
image.jpg -rwxrwxrwx