Blurry/pixelated icons at random in Finder windows

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill

This worked for me on a Mac Pro Early 2009 which I upgraded from Lion (10.7.5) to Mountain Lion (10.8.4 andSoftware Update to 10.8.5).

Thanks so much, Mikaël.

1. Open Applications in Finder.
2. Locate the pixelated icon in the dock.
3. Remove that icon from the dock and poof it.
4. Open the application from the Finder Applications window.
5. Drag the app to your selected place on the dock.

Don't know why this happens, but apparently it is in need of a software update.

Mavericks fixed it.

no, it didn't.

Wow! This is a completely different issue, affecting not just icons and graphics but the whole desktop. It's not the kind of pixelation we were facing. This could even be a hardware issue.

It fixed it for me but try Mavericks Cash Cleaner and see if that fixes it.

http://download.cnet.com/Mavericks-Cache-Cleaner/3000-18512_4-76019113.html?tag= mncol;1

Mavericks did fix it, but it added so many other bugs and overall system slowness that I had to revert to Mountain Lion... and now I have this bug again 😟 I'd stick with Mavericks if only it didn't make everything take extra RAM and extra VRAM. What was all that about "improved memory management"?

I've fixed it before. I forget what I did, but I had no pixelated icons anywhere. I'm trying to remember what I did!

Open terminal (to find it quickly just press command space then type in terminal)

then type

rm Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

press enter then reboot

mviltan: worked like a charm. thanks so much. seriously -- is it really that big of deal?

No, but it drove me BATTY!

🙂

Hi, I was able to fix the problem. I tried all of the above solutions and they didnt work for me.

I was using Path Finder as a finder replacement and used it to change icons which resulted in blurry/pixelated icons. I stumbled across the original Finder and used it to change icons which werent blurry or pixelated and that fixed the problem.

Hope that helps!

Great. The Terminal trick removes all your Finder dock layout preferences, i.e. what you've got in it and what you haven't. Thanks for the warning. My Mac now looks like I've reinstalled ML. But at least it's fixed the problem.

Wow! thanks buddy, I've spent hours on this problem and have actually deleted the thumbnail file before but didn't think of changing display resolutions. It must not bother to reload this thumbnail file until your reset your resolution. This problem has come and gone so I suspect it's something to do with the system not changing the thumbnails when you add custom icons to the finder.

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For those who are saying "Mavericks fixed this", could you please clarify as to whether the problem is "fixed" in the sense that the icon thumbnail cache no longer needs to be cleared periodically by people who customarily create and attach hundreds of custom icons to files? I have read this entire thread, and so many older posts have announced "fixes" that were really only temporary. Like the difference between mopping a floor vs fixing a leak in the roof.

A good test is to create a folder containing 200 or more image files, each of which has a custom icon created by opening the image and copying some piece of the image (more than 300 pixels in at least one dimension, but NOT nicely 512x512), and pasting it over the default icon image in Get Info. (In my case, I make scans of vintage greeting cards, and since the full scan is typically unfolded to show all four panels of the card, but the files are hard to recognize in the Finder when the full image is scaled to icon size, what I do is create a custom icon for each card by scaling the front section only down to about 360 px to 400 px in the long dimension. Most cards are not square.)

If the problem is fixed, you will be able to open and scroll through such folders in icon view at a variety of large icon sizes (higher than 200 px) without any periodic rebooting or cache cleaning, and the custom icons will stay sharp all the way up to the size that you saved them at.

Eric Westley's suggestion of never creating such folders in the first place (instead subdividing the folders so that each contains only a modest number of files) works, but is very annoying, since the whole purpose of using custom icons is to allow visually scanning a folder to look for a given card. Having a lot of folders with fewer cards requires opening each of those folders. Furthermore, it often forces an unnaturally fine categorization, making it ambiguous as to what folder a given image file should be placed in. I'd rather live with blurry icons than have to use an unintuitive categorization.

I would like to know if upgrading to Maverick, which I have not done, will relieve me of this headache. The announcement that "Mavericks fixed this" is so terse that it is unclear what form the fix took.

Mavericks didn't fix diddly. Pay those posts no mind. Yosemite on the other hand did resolve the issue. Happy upgrading!