Gerald Edgar
Level 3 (776 points)
Mac OS X

Q: Sierra alias icon

I found this strange thing in Sierra.  Is it only me?  An alias has only the generic document icon.  It still works.  "Get Info" shows the correct icon.  But a Finder window in icon view shows it only as a rectangle with the corner folded down.

Mac Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12)

Posted on Sep 21, 2016 6:17 PM

Close
Gerald Edgar

Q: Sierra alias icon

  • All replies
  • Helpful answers

  • by Garry Brooke,

    Garry Brooke Garry Brooke Sep 21, 2016 9:44 PM in response to Gerald Edgar
    Level 1 (32 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 21, 2016 9:44 PM in response to Gerald Edgar

    Yes, there has been a change with aliases.  At first all old aliases show a generic icon instead of a folder.  I found that all original icons are restored if a single folder is changed from List view to Icon view and back again.  Problem fixed.

     

    I have some aliases with custom icons.  They've not been affected by the change.

     

    Also, all new aliases now are only 800 to 900 bytes instead of 1.3MB.  I like that change which saves a good amount of space but, I wish there was some documentation for users.

     

    Anyway, I'm going to delete and recreate all my aliases and save some space !

     

     

    Garry

  • by Gerald Edgar,

    Gerald Edgar Gerald Edgar Sep 22, 2016 7:56 AM in response to Garry Brooke
    Level 3 (776 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 22, 2016 7:56 AM in response to Garry Brooke

    I think it is not yet solved. 

     

    I re-created an alias.  Its icon looked good.  I restarted the Mac.  Bad again.

     

    or:

    Switch to list view and back to icon view.  Alias icons are good.  Restart Mac.  Alias icons are bad.

  • by Gerald Edgar,

    Gerald Edgar Gerald Edgar Sep 22, 2016 8:02 AM in response to Garry Brooke
    Level 3 (776 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 22, 2016 8:02 AM in response to Garry Brooke

    duplicate post

  • by Garry Brooke,

    Garry Brooke Garry Brooke Sep 22, 2016 5:40 PM in response to Gerald Edgar
    Level 1 (32 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 22, 2016 5:40 PM in response to Gerald Edgar

    Yes, same here.  After a reboot, was in List View with faulty icons which were 'fixed' by switching to icon view and back.  I think that this only happens with a cold boot.  I had quite a lot of restarts and log off/on with no problem I remember.

     

    I think it's a bug which we should report either by customer feedback or a developer channel.

     

    Cheers.

  • by Keith Culotta2,

    Keith Culotta2 Keith Culotta2 Sep 28, 2016 8:31 AM in response to Gerald Edgar
    Level 1 (18 points)
    Desktops
    Sep 28, 2016 8:31 AM in response to Gerald Edgar

    This "fix" worked to make an individual folder's alias display the correct icon, and it survived a reboot.

    Do a "Get Info" on the alias, and you should see that the correct icon is displayed at the top left of the Get Info window.

    Copy the icon and paste it back.  When the window is closed, the correct icon should appear in the Finder window.

    Once the icon has been pasted back in, the size of the alias goes from ~800k to ~1,200k.