Blurry/pixelated icons at random in Finder windows

thank you Dolphbucs .... what I wanted to say but didnt have the heart to do 😁

MaestroCreep3k wrote:

thank you Dolphbucs .... what I wanted to say but didnt have the heart to do 😁

...if all this is so freakin' easy, why does  not simply release a system update that delivers their customs from this annoying and very ineffective system behavior?

It probably only affects a small group.

I'm pretty sure it happens on our Macs because we have and use hundreds of gigabytes of images and manage them in the Finder - as the Apple-approved workflow (iPhoto) is not suitable for multiple Macs and we're not able to pay $$$$$ for professional asset management software.

Although we occasionally saw this happen in Leopard (once every 6 months perhaps), once we moved to Snow Leopard this year we can hardly go for a couple of days without having the Finder icons of our graphics be totally unusable (blur, pixelation, TV static or just plain gone). My wife used to panic when it happened before, thinking her files were corrupted or destroyed but a restart always brought them back. She now just sighs exasperatedly and reboots, shooting me a weary glare as if to say "Why did we have to move to Snow Leopard?"

As far as I see it: A thread with about 18 pages of postings might affect a little bit more than "just a small group".

And, assuming that a problem like that can be solved by the programmers of our favoured OS quite easily (come on, this is nothing like "antennagate" or "iPhone saving movement profiles with your backup" or the like), it should be done.

The glares of your wife is, what should be recognized by  : This problem, when arising, is as redundant as having the crabs - only, that it is very much more boring...

Notary Sojak wrote:

I'm pretty sure it happens on our Macs because we have and use hundreds of gigabytes of images and manage them in the Finder - as the Apple-approved workflow (iPhoto) is not suitable for multiple Macs and we're not able to pay $$$$$ for professional asset management software.

It's NOT the use of pictures in the Finder, but the use of "non-standard" icons or software that sets thumbnail images for certain files corrupting the icon cache. I can use finder for weeks dealing with folders containing in excess of 100,000 pictures and no problem ... but when I start using ComicBookLover, a program which takes the first image of a rar or zip archive and makes it the thumbnail icon for that file, the blurring effect shows up within hours if not minutes.

Once again this is something that has been gone over several times during the course of this thread. I don't mean to be rude or snarky, but as has been pointed out, this has become an 18 page thread and I just want to point out to people jumping to the end of this thread the first time they read it that these possibilities have already been discussed ... possibly to prevent the rehashing of things others have already thought of. No sense making this thread any more cumbersome than it already is. LOL

@SeBIG - this thread has gone to 18 pages over the years, but it is mostly the same folks trying to resolve it. There are also only a couple of other dead threads where it was discussed. Statistically not very large, but a major frustration for those of us that have to deal with it. Obviously this is not any sort of priority to Apple's developers. They would rather streamline the OS by removing even more of its pre-OSX usefulness.

@Dolphbucs - I read the entire thread a month or so ago when we began using our Snow Leopard machines and first encountered the flaky icon behaviour. I also went through the couple of other mentions here and elsewhere trying to resolve the problem.
3rd party icon creation may well be a significant trigger, but we see it even with all custom icons deleted, prefs deleted and caches wiped.

We have used Graphic Converter to create Finder icons & previews since before the turn of the century and it's only with Snow Leopard that the icon corruption has become frequent.

I am very surprised that you have no problems with folders containing 100,000 files. We have turned off icon/preview creation in both GC and Photoshop, removed all icons & previews (GC has a command to do that) and turned on the Show Icon Preview option in the folders we use. Now when we open a folder with several hundred images, it is anywhere up to 3 minutes before the Finder window is populated, then a few more minutes before the icons get their previews. This is on our top-of-the-line early-2011 MacBook Pros with 7200rpm drives. Opening a folder of images on our file server (2.8GHz dual quad-core MacPro) via our 802.11N AirPort Extreme is excruciating - after several minutes you can watch the icons show up at a rate of about 2 a second. If we plug a MBP into our gigabit network they appear in about 1/3 the time but that's still not really very usable. In pre-SL days with GC or Photoshop created icons/previews these same shared folders populated in a few seconds and the icons' appearance was not delayed.

Obviously, upgrading to MBP ThunderBooks that require SL was not the cure-all we were hoping for. Though they handle Photoshop and multiple browsers much better, this SL icon issue is a pain in the patootie.

Notary Sojak wrote:

We have used Graphic Converter to create Finder icons & previews since before the turn of the century and it's only with Snow Leopard that the icon corruption has become frequent.

I would be willing to bet that the above is the cause for the issue on your system(s). Even if you are no longer using GC to create Finder Icons and Previews, unless you have since re-formatted your drive and performed a truly clean re-install of Snow Leopard, there may still be some system files affected by an earlier use of GC.

Case in Point, before moving to Lion, I did perform a re-format and complete re-install of Snow Leopard on my MBP ( 17" circa 2008 ). I had absolutely no blurred icon issues ( using folders of the size I described before ) until I started once again using the "trigger app" ( for me, ComicBookLover ), and then it started all over.

Also, I just received a brand new 27" iMac with Lion. First 10 days I had it, no problem. After using CBL, blurring occurred ( although not as frequent as in Snow Leopard ). BTW, if I don't use CBL for a period of time ( or try viewing files with thumbnails/icons created by CBL ) I do not get the blurring affect until after I have. This is on both machines mentioned.

The fact that, at least on my system, the blurring never occurs until CBL is used OR I view icons/thumbnails created in such a manner, would seem to indicate that the effect is caused by third party software and is not able to be replicated running a pure OS X environment ... perhaps that is why Apple is having such a hard time finding a fix ... it could simply be that these third party apps, or even some older icons, are using standards no longer supported in 10.6 and above.

Remember what Sir Arthur Conan Dolyle wrote in the Sherlock Holmes novels: "once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth" ... at least I think that's how it went LOL

Dolphbucs - I don't know how you are able to work with folders where the Finder has to generate 100,000 icon previews on the fly but if it works for you, great. As a test, I had booted from the vanilla HD from my new MBP that I had pulled to replace with a larger drive. Photoshop & Graphic Converter had never been insalled on it. I opened the folder of 2000 images where we had dleted all custom image & folder icons. The pinwheel spun for almost 2 minutes before the icons began to appear. This is no way to get work done.

I filed a detailed bug report with Apple (Bug ID# 10486651), and reported this to the author of Graphic Converter - referencing this thread. I do not seiously expect anything to result from it, but we can hope.

I think you may be missing my point. The fact that many have NOT had this issue ... and the fact that I have been able to show that on at least two pristine systems the blurring effect does not take place, logically indicates that the problem is NOT with OS X persay, but rather with the way some software OR custom icons interact with the system. Trust me ... I know troubleshooting ( I used to be able to find a syntax error within dozens of pages of COBOL code within seconds ).

Simply booting from a "vanilla drive" does not make the system pure. You pointed out that after doing so, you have opened the folder of 2000 images where you had deleted all custom images & folder icons, but that does not eliminate two possibilities:

1) deleting these custom images & folder icons may have left some residual code in some or all of the files ( or even in the folder ) which could still be corrupting the icon cache as finder loads those files.

2) if you used GC to remove theses things, it could well have done so by simply overwriting information on the files in the same non-standarfd way that triggered the problem in the first place.

The only way to reach a true "control" environment is to perform a clean install of OS X, run it without installing additional software ( such as GC ), and then view pictures and icons that have not been touched ever by GC or any other software that may have altered the icons of those files. That is what I have done, and it is only after re-introducing such software into the system that the problem re-appears ( both in Snow Leopard and in Lion ).

What we all need to start doing is contact the authors of software such as GC and ComicBookLover and have them examine what it is in the code of their products that is triggering this effect. You wouldn't call GM and ask them to redesign their cars to be able to run with gas that has water in it ( defective gas ). Likewise we shouldn't expect Apple to be able to "fix" OS X to prevent all flawed software from adversely affecting the OS.

Add me to the list.

Just began for me 1/4/12 out of the blue. Have not installed anything new. No updates/upgrades recently.

There are so many pages of comments here, but I'm not seeing a clear solution to this.

Wish I hadn't upgraded to Snow Leopard. There always seems to be these niggling problems with every upgrade. Leopard was almost 100% bulletproof. There does not appear to be one absolute solution here out of all the gazillion posts. Apple needs to step up to the plate on this one.

Dolphbucs, your troubleshooting skills are excelent but I think your analogy & conclusion are absolving Apple when it appears they are at least partly the root cause. I would certainly call GM on the carpet if their engines had been dealing with watered fuel just fine for a decade and then they suddenly removed that capability without letting anyone know. Similarly here, Adobe Photoshop, GC, CBV, etc have been creating previews & icons since the last century and Apple's Systems have had no problems displaying them in the Finder.

The first reports of this issue appear to coincide with adding to the Finder the ability to generate icons on the fly - despite the load that puts on the system for hardcore graphics users - so if they changed how custom icons are handled they either did not make it known to the developer community, or said community ignored the information. So far, GC's author and the support forum community have not seen this happen (except fo one lone post - also around the time SL came out) but I will bring it up again with your suggestion that someone is munging the writing & wiping of the icon/preview data.

If Apple now does not want us to be able to put custom icons on files & folders, then they should prevent us from simply being able to paste images in the Get Info window and those are randomly blurring too.

I couldnt agree more with Notary as when this problem struck was only when I "upgraded" to SL back then, neither the version of GC (6.7.4) or PS (CS4 Extended) changed at the time. I believe this problem lays solely at the feet of Apple whether it was a lack of communication with developers or just a problem that wasn't anticipated.

I have to admit that I'd be rather dismayed if Apple wanted us to stop using/creating custom icons as its bad enough that they've pretty much cut off the creation of customizing the interface (what happened to the individuality Apple preached about in the past??? ::: flashback to the 1984 commercial 😉 :::) .... I can't stand the fact that they want everyones desktop to look identical, the way Windows used to be .... yes a gradual flip-flop has happened ... anyways, as I stated earlier on in this thread the problem isn't as bad in Lion as it was in SL but it STILL DOES HAPPEN, basically instead of rebooting my machine 10+ times a day as I had to in SL I'm now only having to do so 1 or 2 times a day. Still, I'd like it to be like the days of Leopard and Tiger with 0 reboots because of pixelated/blurry/white noise simulated/completely missing icons.

MaestroCreep3k wrote:

I have to admit that I'd be rather dismayed if Apple wanted us to stop using/creating custom icons as its bad enough that they've pretty much cut off the creation of customizing the interface (what happened to the individuality Apple preached about in the past??? ::: flashback to the 1984 commercial 😉 :::) .... I can't stand the fact that they want everyones desktop to look identical, the way Windows used to be .... yes a gradual flip-flop has happened ...

100% ACK.😟

Also have the same issue, Working a lot with photo's and sometimes not able to recognise the image. Ver annoying !