Missing Icons in Dock

Try deleting this:

Your home /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist.

Log out and in.

Hi I also have icons missing and tried your suggestion to the above and it bought all the icons back to the dock except Expose' and Shapes. I looked in applications and they weren't in there but I found both in Applications > Utilities and they are the old Icons I had in Leopard. Thanks for the first part, any suggestions on the current? Kind Regards.

I'm seeing it too, seemingly at random. It's affecting icons of all types: programs, dock icons, and mounted volumes. The name appears, but where the icon should be, there's just a blank space. (An alternative I'm also seeing is that the icon does appear, but it's pixelated, as if it's an upsampled version of the 16x16 size.)

Others in the forum have reported it too, but the good news is it appears to be largely cosmetic. I'm guessing it'll be resolved soon, perhaps in 10.6.1.

just want to add my voice to this discussion so Apple knows this is a problem.

icons missing on desktop folders and the thumbnails of pictures don't show up either on the desktop (if that's where the picture (jpg) files are located) or even inside the folders when the jpg files are located there...

also, if you try to drag an item by where it's icon SHOULD be (immediately above the file name), it can't be dragged - you must drag the file by using it's name...which seems really weird to me...seems like something that shouldn't have been messed with when the engineers compiled SL...

but now I can see thumbnails of .flv files on the desktop which weren't there under 10.5.x...very confusing...and disappointing...should have followed others' advice and waited to upgrade to SL, but thought I'd try being an "early adopter" and look what happens! 😉 lol

Plus 1 on missing ICONS in the dock, under Go in the tool bar icons for Home Desktop etc are gone.

update: Version should read. Mac OS X v10.6 /snow Leopard.

Yep, some of mine are gone too. Firefox for instance (and others). I don't use the dock much but the icons are also missing in the cmd+tab screen which is irritating.

fyi my icons are missing from the "applications" file for almost ALL utilities! (but dock icons seem to be okay...so far...)

found something in another thread...

deleted this: com.apple.desktop.plist

then restarted and my icons in the folders appear to be back, as well as the icons on the desktop (though 1 went missing in the restart for some reason)...

(but now textedit won't let me copy, unless I copy the whole document! guess I gotta look for another forum for THAT now! 😟 lol)

I'm having a similar issue as well, except my icons have completely vanished but the space for both icons have vanished.

UPDATE: My TextEdit icon has returned somehow.

Anyways, I grabbed a screenshot to explain what my issue currently is. The "missing" icons are Safari and TextEdit.

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/7866/iconissue.png

I hope that this does get fixed, along with the currently many "spinning pinwheels" that seem to be cropping up lately as well. Any assistance you can give in this situation would be great to hear as well.

Thank you in advance!

did you try deleting the User>Library>Preferences>com.apple.desktop.plist, emptying trash, then restarting? after restart, if your icons reappear in whatever folder they are in (applications?) can they be dragged to the dock? just a thought...

like I said, doing that brought back my icons (none of mine were missing from the dock, only the desktop & in the folders where the actual items reside) but dragging to the dock usually puts that item in the dock, so maybe it would work...

good luck!

Just to add that I had exactly the same problem (in my case missing iTunes, Calculator icons in Dock) and deleting the file mentioned and re-starting seems to have cured the problem. Only noticeable unwanted result was background picture reset to default.

Hamish

Had the same problem myself, funnly enough it was the iWorks 09 apps that were missing.

Used the same solution as describe above (deleting the dock.plist) and that solved the disappearing icons problem.

My only quibble with this is, that your entire Dock goes back to default along with other configurations for your desktop (Expose was turned off). I do hope Apple comes up with a proper fix for this and not just hope that we delete the same file over and over and over.

Hi A A P L,

Tnx for the perfect solution:

I went to my folder ~/MyName/Library/Preferences

I found the file:
com.apple.dock.plist.

I moved it to the trash.

Restarted my iMac and everything was back to normal.
Instead of restarting maybe login and logout is sufficient.

I removed com.apple.dock.db and the just did a "killall Dock" which fixed it for me.