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. :)
I just did a search and I see that in my data files I have approximately 8,000 folders. Looking at the first 100, I counted 10 that appear as generic documents, so that means I need to re-assemble 10% of my 8,000 folders - that's 800 of them - and who knows how many of them I have set up with aliases for quick access.
Really?
Apple: please fix this. It isn't Apple interface pretty, and it's pretty confusing looking.
Catalina has given me the worst transition of any of the numerous upgrades over the years.........and I've had Mac's since the late 1980's.
Thanks PT. I did the copy and paste of icons in the top of the info panel, correcting the icons yesterday.
I fixed approximately 100 of the 800 that are showing wrong.
And every time I fix one I think about how stupid this is.
I'm experiencing the same problem that some of my folder icons, randomly, are appearing as generic file icons (white paper with upper right corner folded down).
Thank you guys for saving me the time of trying all the things that will NOT work. I already tried a few myself. I wanted to be positive because, I hate to say it but I almost NEVER find solutions in the Apple discussions forums. It's always the blind leading the blind in here. No offense please. I appreciate your time spent seeking solutions. Then you have the other extreme—webpages with programmers telling you to type things into Terminal. This is like brain surgery. Unless you're a programmer you are trusting complete strangers telling you to type unknown commands which could mess everything up because they are deep and universal. Usually the best solutions are found in tech articles. There are several on "Fixing Catalina's problems" but none that address this problem!
Please APPLE solve this problem: In Catalina the folder icons are randomly appearing as generic file icons!
I can indeed verify what Henry is saying regarding slowing down your Mac.
There is another Finder bug which I believe may be directly related to the one we have been discussing in this thread. This other bug has been mentioned in these forums before, but I thought about it again this morning as I was reading some of the new comments in this thread.
The other bug -- which is still not fixed as far as I know -- is that if you have an external hard drive containing hundreds of videos in folders and subfolders, as well as other files, and if you apply custom icons to those folders, subfolders and files, the Finder majorly stalls and you get the typical beachball.
Depending on how many custom icons you have applied, the beachballing can last for minutes, hours, or never stop at all, forcing you to reboot your machine. Sometimes holding down the option key and right-clicking the Finder icon in the Dock and choosing "Relaunch" can get you out of it, but not always.
As Henry noted, I eventually came to the conclusion that the stalls were resulting from the Finder trying to draw all of those custom icons. Eventually, I was forced to remove every single custom icon I had added, which was time-consuming. Only then did the problem completely disappear, and viewing folders and files on my external hard drive became snappy again.
Please note that this was on a high quality Western Digital external hard drive, using a iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) with a 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor, and with 16 GB of memory. Despite that, the Finder just couldn't handle all of those custom icons. It was kind of sad, because I had specifically added the custom icons so that my young granddaughter could easily find what she wanted to watch.
Oddly enough, in the release notes which accompany this update, Apple doesn’t even specifically mention the generic icon issue. Considering how many people have been affected by it, I would think that it is at least worth a mention.
Also, IIRC, I have read elsewhere that installing 10.15.1 did not fix the generic icons for some people. I think it would be helpful if we got more feedback here from others regarding whether or not 10.15.1 fixed the icon issue for them.
I have nothing to add to this discussion other than to say that I am experiencing this same issue.
I hear you, Cliff. Having done it myself yesterday, I can tell you that it is NOT fun. :(
BTW, I have been a loyal customer for over 4 decades. I was wondering what I was going to do over the long weekend :-)
Didn’t work for me...
I have the very same issue and the Terminal solution is way too complex for me as I have thousands of folders affected. Apple, PLEASE FIX THIS!
FWIW today’s Catalina update did not solve this problem.
...and I should add that, even if the fault is rectified by Apple, it will take me forever (almost!) to manually go through all affected folders and re-change the icons to my preferred images.
Me too. Generic, file-type folders dotted here and there in the file system, mostly in Dropbox-hosted folders. Perform normally but very unsightly.
Folders with generic "document" icon
