User profile for user: MadisonEbo
MadisonEbo Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Finder icons turned black

Hello,

I just recently switched to Mac and I'm having a problem with Finder Icons. I have hundreds of photos (tif, jpg, dng, psd) in numerous folders and when I view them in icon view or column view the images are previewed as small icons (which is exactly what I want).

However, I have two folders that contain tif files and some of these icons are displayed as solid black instead of an image preview. The very first time I opened these folders, all the images previewed as icons but subsequently some of them have turned black. The images preview fine in Preview and open fine in Photoshop.

I have the Show Icon Preview option selected in the View Option menu but some icons are still black whereas others preview fine (all are tif files).

Any way to fix this?

Thanks in advance.

iMac 24", Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Aug 19, 2008 9:06 AM

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9 replies
User profile for user: baltwo
baltwo
User level: Level 9
62,386 points

Aug 19, 2008 2:27 PM in response to MadisonEbo

Maybe the LaunchServices database is hosed up. Launch Terminal.app, copy & paste this command into the window, and hit the return key…

*/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchS ervices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user*

Then, restart and see if you can duplicate the issue.
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User profile for user: Francine Schwieder
Francine Schwieder
User level: Level 6
19,076 points

Aug 19, 2008 4:28 PM in response to MadisonEbo

Put them in icon view and make the icons a pretty fair size using View->Show View Options. Are they just plain black, or is there a kind of graduated grey, with the letters "exec" in a neon green in the upper left corner? If so, the Finder is just classifying them wrongly, as UNIX executable files.

The only other thing that occurs to me is that there is something funny about an alpha channel in the tif. Only thing is, my old tif files with a solid apha channel show up as plain white in Column view's Preview, as a perfectly transparent nothing in QuickLook, but do have a tiny thumb in list view (perhaps due to a trip thru Photoshop).
Francine

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Francine
Schwieder
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User profile for user: MadisonEbo
MadisonEbo Author
User level: Level 1
8 points

Aug 22, 2008 3:12 PM in response to baltwo

Yes, I restarted.

Intersetingly, I deleted all those tifs that were black and recopied them from my archived DVD to the mac and they immediately came up black!

The icons are indeed black. Solid black (with a nice white border). This makes no sense to me as I have 1000s of tifs created with the same camera and they all show the preview in the icons. I'm stumped.
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User profile for user: photoboy711
photoboy711
User level: Level 1
0 points

Nov 22, 2008 2:04 PM in response to offthebonet

I also have this problem- I have a large archive (100K+) of pro imagery - some of my .dcr files create this black icon while plenty of others generate a generic icon and others will render a clean index image. It also seems to be with files that have been migrated a couple of times on external drives - interestingly, dvd backups that were burnt at the time of archive ( some back as far as 03) are completely trouble free.

love to know what causes this and a possible fix.

tia Chris
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Finder icons turned black

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