Folders with generic "document" icon

Well, it turns out that I dug deeper into my hard drive, and I in fact found some old folders from years ago which still do have the white generic document icon. So, I decided to put Kapitan Kloss's instructions to the test. Leave it to those "Germans" to figure out this kind of stuff. :) :)

For the sake of any inexperienced users who may be having a hard time understanding all of this, I am going to give you a simple, clear example in the Terminal app, which you will find in /Applications/Utilities.

Suppose that your user name on your machine is "Tom". On your hard drive, in your "Documents" folder, you have another folder called "My Work Reports", and within that folder you have a subfolder called "Languages". Now, inside of the "Languages" folder, you have discovered some folders which have the white generic document icon. So the first thing you need to do is to navigate to the "Languages" folder like this by using the "cd" -- or "change directory" -- command:

cd /users/tom/documents/my\ work\ reports/languages/

After typing that, you obviously have to hit your "return" key.

1. Please notice that you don't need to specify uppercase or lowercase in the path. Lowercase will work just fine.
2. Please also notice that if you have folder names with spaces in them, you need to escape them with a backslash.

After using the previous command, you will be in your "Languages" folder.

The next step is to list everything that is found in the "Languages" folder, so we use this command:

ls -l

Again, hit your "return" key after typing it. That command will produce something like this:

drwxr-xr-x 3 tom staff 96 Apr 25 06:20 Afrikaans

drwxr-xr-x@ 5 tom staff 160 Apr 25 06:23 English

drwxr-xr-x 3 tom staff 96 Apr 25 06:32 French

drwxr-xr-x@ 4 tom staff 128 Apr 25 06:30 German

drwxr-xr-x@ 6 tom staff 192 Apr 25 06:35 Korean

drwxr-xr-x@ 4 tom staff 128 Apr 25 06:23 Portuguese

drwxr-xr-x 3 tom staff 96 Apr 25 04:38 Slovak

drwxr-xr-x@ 6 tom staff 192 Apr 25 07:02 Spanish

As you can see, five of the folders are marked with the "@", which, as Kapitan Kloss explained, means that they "have the "extended attributes" (Finder metadata) included" with them.

So, let's say we want to find out what extended attributes that "English" folder has. Thus, in the Terminal again, we would type the following:

xattr english

Again, hit your "return" key after typing that.

The above command will produce the following result, and immediately return you to your command prompt, like this. Incidentally, "HD" represents the supposed name of our hard drive in this example. As you can see, we are still in the "Languages" folder:

com.apple.FinderInfo

com.apple.macl

HD:languages tom$

So, to remove the "com.apple.FinderInfo" attribute from the folder named "English" we would type the following, and hit the "return" key:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo english

Now, you can do the same thing individually with the other four folderes, and hit the "return" key after each command like this:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo german

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo korean

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo portuguese

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo spanish

As you do each one, you will immediately see each folder on your hard drive revert back to the normal blue folder.

Or, as Kapitan Kloss also explained, you can save time and use the wildcard symbol "*" to do all four of them at once like this:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo*

Again, hit your "return" key after typing that command.

Please note that this will only affect folders in the "Languages" folder. To change folder icons in other folders, you obviously need to navigate there first using the "cd" command.

I hope these more extended instructions help some of you.

Thanks Kapitan Kloss for pointing us in the right direction. :)

I also got many folders with generic white icons after upgrading to Catalina. I noticed that affected folders have the "extended attributes" (Finder metadata) included, as evidenced by "@" in the long listing for the second folder (my commands in italics):

ls -l

drwxr-xr-x  15 user  staff     480 Feb  1  2008 Folder1

drwxrwxrwx@ 23 user  staff     736 Oct 15  2017 Folder2

Command xattr reveals the type of metadata:

xattr Folder2

com.apple.FinderInfo

It can be removed with:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo Folder2

and the folder icon is restored. The folders in question were carried through many backup/restore cycles and computer swaps, so they must be dating to much older OS versions, even pre-OS X. Probably that's why this does not affect everyone. I hope this helps.

Yigal are both of your Macs actually running Catalina? If not, and only one of them is, you may be experiencing what I experienced earlier when I mounted one of my other machines on my wi-fi network on my desktop. Catalina was showing some of the other machine's folders as the white generic document icons, when in reality, they were actually still blue, when I went over and looked on that machine itself. So it was like an illusion being created by Catalina.

As I noted earlier, I am convinced that this is some kind of Finder display bug which only Apple can truly fix. If you read my earlier comments in this thread, you will see that not even a re-install of Catalina will get rid of the white generic document icons. The only solution is to manually create new folders, and move your contents into them, or to paste a new folder icon on top of the generic icons. It is odd that "Get Info" pasting is not working for you, because others here have reported that it does work. I haven't tried it myself.

Of course one can do all folders at a given level at once, ignoring error messages for those which do not have the extra attributes:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo *

and yes, it does require navigating the folder hierarchy in the Terminal. It's not without a downside, since I think the command removes also other attributes, like labels, that you might actually want to preserve.

Maybe a proper form of the find command would let you do this recursively, but in my case I don't have enough of those folders to justify the effort...

The com.apple.FinderInfo stores legacy ‘Finder Info’ and additional not documented information for the Finder. Known are the color-tag or the hide extension flag (like .txt or .jpg) from the Get Info. Catalina still creates FinderInfo but I don't know if it also depends on it or if it's for backwards compatibility. New folders don't get it, so it seems safe to delete the attribute for folders. But I prefer not to delete the FinderInfo from files - and that does the above published Terminal command also. The following Terminal command is more selective:

find . -type d -exec xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo {} \; 2> /dev/null

The "find . -type d" part outputs only the path of all folders (and folders in folders etc., another benefit of this approach) in the current Terminal directory, and passes that to the "-exec xattr" command (the {}). "2> /dev/null" inhibits a long list of errors for folders without FinderInfo. Because also nested folders are cleaned the execution can take some time if Documents or your user folder is your starting point.

But it should be clear: this is a Finder bug, misinterpreting com.apple.FinderInfo, and Apple should solve it, not maybe risky Terminal commands.

I just copied the icon of a blue folder to the icon of a blank folder via Cmd-I. Worked fine.

The 10.15.1 update today solved this issue.

What, if I may ask, do you find so "worthless" about that explanation? That is the same message we apparently all receive when we have folders and files in locations which are no longer permitted under Catalina. You simply need to do as I did,, and put those folders and files in an Apple-approved location under Catalina. The most obvious place is in your Home folder.

As far as the latter instructions regarding configuration files, that may be a little more tricky if you were not the one who made the customizations in the configuration files. If you were the one to make them, then it shouldn't be too difficult to experiment, and see what Catalina will accept. She is apparently a feisty, demanding girl! :)

Denise, my point was that just because you personally do not understand the message provided by Apple does not make it worthless. It in fact tells us what we need to know in a rather straight forward manner.

To be honest, as far as I can tell, other than manually fixing all of the folders, there is no other way to resolve this issue. In fact, the truth of the matter is that making new folders or pasting a new icon on each folder is kind of a deceptive fix, because in reality, the bug in the Finder display still exists. All we are really doing is covering it up.

As proof of this, read my previous comments. If you happen to be on a wi-fi network in your home or office, connect to one of the other machines and look at the folders when that machine's hard drive icon appears on your desktop. What you will see is that some of the folders on that machine also appear to have the white generic icon. However, if you go over to that machine, and actually look at those folders, you will see that they are in fact still blue.

So you see, it is Catalina that has some kind of display bug in the Finder. It is not displaying what is actually there. Only Apple can really fix this. We cannot. In fact, my concern is that with the first incremental update of Catalina, all of our folders may possibly revert back to the white generic icon, unless Apple really fixes this problem at the source.

Well, this is weird. As I mentioned earlier, when I mounted my other machine (El Capitan) on my Catalina desktop via my wi-fi connection, some of the folder icons on the El Capitan machine also appeared as the white generic document icon, even though in reality, they are really still blue on that machine. I visually confirmed that this is so by walking over to it yesterday. As I said before, that is why I deduced that this problem is some kind of display bug with Catalina's Finder.

Well, there has been a long-running OS problem with keeping computers connected via a wi-fi connection. This results from the fact that the "Sharing" option somehow becomes disabled in the "System Preferences" on the other machine. This forces me to quite often go over there and re-enable the option on that machine. When this happens, I obviously have to reconnect to that machine on my Catalina machine.

Well, earlier today, I had to do exactly that. But this time I did something else, and this may possibly be the cause of what I am about to tell you. After I reconnected the El Capitan machine to this, my Catalina machine, when the other machine's tab loaded in the desktop window on my Catalina machine, the top level icons were the little 16-pixel icons, instead of what I guess are the 32-pixel images, or larger size. So, I took a minute to go into the "Show View Options" settings for the tab, and switched it to the larger icon size.

Well, I don't know if taking that action is what caused this to happen, but just now, I noticed that all of the folders on the El Capitan machine which previously had the white generic document icon when viewed from my Catalina machine, are now restored to their normal blue folder icon, when viewed on my Catalina machine. I looked at multiple folders on the El Capitan machine that is mounted in a tab on my Catalina machine, and they are indeed all appearing blue now. I looked in different areas of the El Capitan mounted disk, just to make sure that I wasn't imagining things.

So as I said, I don't know why they are suddenly all blue again, but changing the icon size on the top level of the El Capitan machine, as it appeared in the tab on my Catalina machine, is the only thing that I did.

So this begs the question: Does going into "Show View Options" and changing the icon size somehow fix the white generic document icon in some cases?

Well, to add to the mystery, I also just now checked, and there is not a single white generic document icon anywhere on my Catalina machine either. While I did manually fix a few dozen of them yesterday, I know that I didn't find all of them. Yet now, everything is blue again.

I am of course happy about this, but I have no idea how this happened, so that all generic icons are now fixed.

I've been trying to figure out why all of my folders are suddenly blue again when viewed from in Catalina, even on my other machine. I was trying to think what I may have done which resulted in this positive development.

One possibility is that sometime over the past few days, I may have relaunched the Finder. Whether or not that has any thing to do with the blue folders reappearing, I honestly do not know.

For those of you who may not know how to do this, simply hold down your Option key, right-click on the Finder icon in your Dock, and choose the "Relaunch" option. As I said, it may do nothing at all to fix the generic icon problem, but is worth a try, and it won't do any harm to your computer.

The second thing I thought of was that over the past few days, I have made invisible files visible, and vice versa. You can do it in the Terminal, but I have this neat, little, free app called Desktop Utility which does that, and more. You can download it here:

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/38299/desktoputility

Again, I don't know if making invisible files visible, and then reversing it fixed the white generic document icon problem or not. But again, it couldn't hurt to try.

If either of these two options work for anyone here, please let me know. Thanks. I am as curious about this as you are.

I changed mine from document white to folder blue through the "get info" window and they are still blue.

For those who have not ventured into Terminal (a place I never go) to apply the fixes proposed, 10.15.1 fixes the blank icon for select folders. Apple does listen!

Installed update and at least with the one folder I checked, the dozen or so generic icons of folder within that folder were all fixed after the update.

Well folks, I have definitive proof that this is some kind of Finder display bug which is specific to Catalina.

Very briefly, I run my web server on a ten-year-old iMac running El Capitan on my same wi-fi network. I do all of my web graphics work and writing on my main machine -- a iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) with a 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor and 16 GB of memory -- and then I use my wi-fi to transfer the updated work to the web server machine.

Well, just now I was doing exactly that, and when I connected to the older iMac, guess what? On my current machine, some of the folders on the web server machine have the white generic icon. However, I knew that is absolutely not true. In fact, I walked over to the server machine and looked, and sure enough, the folders in my virtual host folder are indeed still all blue. It is just Catalina's Finder which is displaying them as white generic icons.

So, I have thus proven my own theory . . . or at least so I think. :)