Since upgrading to Catalina several folders in my Documents folder are displaying as the generic document icon (blank page with turned down corner) rather than the plain blue folder icon. What can I do to restore folder icon to these folders? Thank you.
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
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.
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. :)
Oh, I agree, Yigal. I too am convinced that it is some kind of display bug in the Finder. For some unknown reason, it is misidentifying some folders as unknown documents. What really threw me was when Catalina displayed some of my blue folder icons as the white generic document icons, when in fact they really are still blue on the other machine. Unlike you, I was able to walk right over to the other machine and verify that it was so. The other machine is actually running El Capitan still, so it was really weird.
I have done the icon paste method and finally completed. (The pasted icons don't exactly match the "real" ones--color and shading slightly off, but that's of no consequence). What I did notice at some point in doing this is that all of affected folders were some of the older ones on my hard drive (like having been created between 1989 and 2000). Those created after these years all seem to be unaffected. I have no idea what this means; it's just an observation.
Yes, at last a real solution that I could understand:
In Relocated Items folder, select white Security icon - get info.
Create a new finder folder and drop it on the white security icon. Fixed
I had over 5700 items in that folder that disappeared; glad to have them back, no thanks to the Apple explanation.
I hope that others who are not having such luck find their answers soon.
I've just had the problem when upgrading to Catalina and I noticed something about the folders that changed. While the contents were new, the folder itself was created many generations ago, probably before OSX, on much older machines. I would guess that there was a change in the structure of the folders which the new operating system finally can't deal with but older systems could.
Something else has happened which might be related. I cant "compress" a folder that used to be no problem. It comes up with an unknown error after working for a while.
There are numerous other issues. Mac Mini (late 2014), Sophos antivirus.
@John: Thanks for trusting me and confirming it works.
@others: I rewrote my own Terminal command John links to, to make it less prone to maybe unwanted side-effects. It's later on on page 5 of this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250711557?answerId=251455489022#251455489022
@Jerry: Copying a blue folder over the generic icon via get info / Cmd-i does not really repair Apple's Finder bug. What it does is create a custom icon for the folder that looks like the default one. Even if Apple solves the bug, it remains a custom icon, using a little bit space on your disk en slowing down a little bit your Mac when it must be displayed.
The tech with whom I spoke said I needed to copy a folder icon from a folder with a good icon, and then paste this copied icon onto each of the folders with the broken icon (in Get Info, of course). Yeah, like I'm really going to do that.
Thank you for asking this question. I likewise upgraded to Catalina early this morning -- took about five hours to install -- and I also have a number of blue folder icons now which have been replaced by the white, generic, document-looking icon with the top right corner bent down. I was hoping that running Disk Utility would fix it, but it did not do so. I wonder if resetting the NVRAM/zapping the PRAM might fix the problem.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063
Update: Nope . . . that didn't do it. I suspect that this is some kind of Finder/file association issue. How to fix it at this point is beyond me . . . but I will keep searching for a solution.
Update #2: Well, I just rebuilt Launch Services using the instructions on this page . . .
https://www.macissues.com/2015/07/17/fix-your-mac-showing-generic-icons-for-files/
. . . but even that did not fix the generic icon issue. I guess it is time to dig even deeper. There must be an easy solution to this somewhere.
Update #3: Well, Bailey, I have more negative news. After my last post here, I continued looking for a solution to this generic icon issue. I tried a variety of Terminal commands which I found on various web pages. This included rebooting in Safe Mode, rebooting in Recovery Mode and trying a few Terminal commands from there, and removing certain property list files from my Library's "Preferences" folder as well. With each failure, I already knew where I was headed: to a macOS software re-install.
So, early this morning at 2:15 AM, I began to re-install Catalina, in the hope that this would surely get rid of those pesky generic icons. Just like when I originally installed Catalina yesterday morning, it took over four hours for the installation to complete. It is now 6:50 AM here, and I just dragged myself out of bed to see if the installation had completed yet.
It has . . . and those darn generic, white, document icons are STILL there!
Even a re-install of Catalina was unable to get rid of them. At this point, I honestly don't know what to do or what to try. Everything I have tried -- including the extreme measure of re-installing the OS -- has failed. Please note that this was NOT a clean re-install. Rather, I installed on top of the already-installed Catalina.
Perhaps a clean install of Catalina would do it, but I have no desire to find out at this point. I will wait and see if anyone discovers a solution and posts it here.
Sorry I was unable to help you.
Thanks for your input, Cliff. The more people who add to this conversation, the more likely it is that it will draw Apple's attention, and hopefully motivate them to find a solution to this annoying problem.
Which is precisely what Bailey and I have already done, and it was indeed monotonous, tedious work.
Seriously, this is the very best that Apple can do in return for how much money we have each spent on their products over the years, and in my case, for over two decades?
I agree with you, Kenneth. That is NOT a fix. A REAL fix would be for Apple to prevent it from happening in the first place.
I had figured this out myself, but didn’t want to have to spend an entire afternoon going through the hundreds of files on my computer doing this. I have folders stacked within folders, stacked within folders, etc. I was hoping for a better answer. Yikes!!
Truly bizarre, if not random. I have two generic folders in my main "MyDocs" folder (about 22gb). None in the Documents folder, but when I go to my external drives--Time Machine, the Super Duper Catalina backup, two Mojave backups that pre-date the Catalina installation, and a miscellaneous (but old) "Storage" drive that has the same two folders on it--those particular folders are all generic!!
Folders with generic "document" icon
