Blurry/pixelated icons at random in Finder windows

This happened frequently on my iMac G5 running the late stages of Leopard (10.5.x), and continued to happen on my iMac 27" (with tons more memory)... I have contacted many sw developers of suspected apps. Thru screen shots and crash dump files... they have been unable to duplicate this. (Even the Graphic Converter creator!).

This is the most disappointing non-response by Apple that I have ever encountered.

My loyalty and technical expertise goes way back to the introduction of the Power Mac. Back when Apple would research and address issues like this... Back when Apple had on-site warranty/AppleCare service in the early 90's.
Restarting, and the occasional PRAM zap will solve the issue for me, temporarily... Typically, I restart around 3 times a day. (I used to keep it running for a couple of months...)

I have seen my icons like that.
I think I just restarted my Mac and went on with my day...

Since there has been no response that I've found from Apple about the blurry icons, and a restart and the occasional PRAM reset seems to fix it temporarily, it suggests to me that maybe a firmware update or something hidden in a Security Update would have addressed this by now... I restart or "cold boot" my Mac about 3 times a day...

I really don 't care about the cause...I just want it fixed, like everyone else on this forum!

I have started new topic
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2600445&tstart=0

I wonder if the issue is having too many custom icons in a single folder. The folder this is most likely to happen in is the Applications folder. On my install I had over 400 apps and folders in here. However, a lot of these are things I barely or never use, but don't want to throw away (maybe I'll find some use for some of the crap I got on those bundles 😉

What I did was created a folder inside the Apps folder called '_unused' and moved a whole chunk in there until the number was under 256 (actually got it down to 200). Did a restart and the problem has not returned. After the restart one or two were still pixelated, but with further (natural) restarts they've all gone not to return.

256 is basically a guess being 2^8. Most apps don't care where they are and I used common sense to avoid moving things that might not work in another folder.

An added benefit was that my Apps folder is less cluttered with stuff I barely use.

It would be interesting to hear if this works for others.

Just started happening to me for Photoshop CS5 files that I saved this morning. Have been running Snow Leopard for a while without noticing this oddness, and haven’t done any installations or anything recently, so not sure what a trigger would be. Irritating nonetheless.

Inconsistent too, I saved 7 new .jpg files today, 4 of them are pixelated, and three are normal.

there is an icon cashe at macintosh hd/private/var/folders/xd/(something that changes each reboot)/caches/com.apple.quicklook.thumbnailcache. if you find this folder you can safely move it to trash and restart the finder. everything works normally again (a new com.apple.quicklook.thumbnailcache folder is generated as soon as it's needed) .
To find this folder you'll need something like "pathfinder" which can navigate invisible folders and has a find that doesn't use spotlight (com.apple.quicklook.thumbnailcache is a system file and spotlight won't hunt for it)
you can dump the folder as many times as you need over a prolonged uptime. the fix works immediately and repeatedly

This was posted by Topher Kessler on CNET and it worked for my icon pixelation issues.

Finder preference corruption?

Additionally, removing the Finder's preference file may also help, since icon rendering is a function of the Finder. The preference file is called "com.apple.Finder.plist" and is located in the /username/Library/Preferences/ folder. Move this to the Desktop and restart the computer (or logout and log back in) and hopefully the Finder will load the icons properly again. Keep in mind that doing this will remove a few customizations of the the Finder, including sidebar additions and recent items, but that should be easy to set up again.

Read more: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10402811-263.html#ixzz1GCoVNguR

Not sure this will help anyone but I was having a similar problem that I was able to solve. I created a custom icon for an app that would show up pixelated/blurry whenever I applied it to the application. This was happening because the icon I created was not square in size, so I opened up the PNG file in Photoshop and made the canvas 128x128, which solved the issue. Ideally icons in Mac OS should be 512x512.

Hi,
Suddenly I get some "blurry/pixelated icons" as well ...
Particularly with every fresh applications I downloaded from App Store ( ).
So a Google search, I found this

http://macbitz.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/the-snow-leopard-pixelated-fuzzy-icon-bu g-possible-fix/

Where you can read about a possible fix (at least it worked for me. For the moment ...) removing a file called "thumbnails.data" you should remove and the restart (to recreate it).
You could locate thumbnails.data file using "FindFile" or "EasyFind".

I hope this help.

This post is showing as resolved, but the only answer I found was to restart the computer?
Last post is almost two years old, however I began to have the blurry/pixelated icons issue few days ago after an update, so I suppose is a new issue that should have been solved long ago.
Any news on how to solve it or what is causing it?

LOL, I was going to comment that this has all been gone over before, but then I glanced at the top of the thread ... really can't blame anyone for not wanting to read through 13 pgs of comments. So,since I've been a participant in this thread for awhile, I'll summarize as best I can.

The reason why this thread is showing as resolved is that it is the nature of this forum that the creator of the thread ( the original poster or OP ) has the right to mark the thread resolved or answered anytime they wish. To the OP of this thread, the issue was probably resolved as much as they thought it would, therefore they marked it such.

It has been pretty much determined that there is an issue with the icon cache. It becomes corrupted in any number of ways. Sometimes by using a third party program that generates thumbnail icons for files. Sometimes simply by using older icons that do not scale well. Sometimes just by reaching a certain number of icons in the cache. Regardless of the way in which the cache becomes corrupted, the only way that seems to consistently, but temporarily, solve the issue is to restart the computer. Sometimes you will find that simply logging out and back in will do the trick. Sometimes restarting finder works, but restart is the only thing that seems to work most, if not every, time.

I know it's not a great solution, but it is one that we have to live with until Apple fixes it.

Message was edited by: Dolphbucs

Message was edited by: Dolphbucs

I only read the last 2 pages of this post...

I believe I never see this problem in 10.6.5 and below using 2 monitors setup (an external monitor is connected to iMac 27"). I'm only starting to see this problem under 10.6.6.

Does anyone know 10.6.7 fix this issue?

Nope, sorry. Still happens in 10.6.7