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. :)
Thanks Henry VM: that terminal command worked perfectly.
The answer is in here. I tried it and it worked.
Henry VM found it on Page 5 using a Terminal code. Here is a link to it.
I agree. I'm here, verified it's happened to others and known by Apple. I'm going to wait it out.
Excellent, thank you. That fixed all my folders.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250711557?answerId=251455489022#251455489022
Seriously, Greg, that was his advice? Wow ... if that is the best that Apple’s tech support can offer, we are in trouble. 🙁👎
I just saw that. Thanks.
Hello - yes same issue, but I have another theory.
I have noted previously that some folder icons were different to others. The newest ones (e.g. in the last ten years) are more or less completely flat whereas as older folder icons (when Apple designs was more 'skeuomorphic') were a bit more 3D angled and maybe had a hint of drop shadow. I can't remember how far back you have to go or when it changed, probably when Jonny Ive got rid of Note Pad's stitching and perforations (and quite right too).
Anyway, I reckon all the folder icons which now have generic document icon are my very oldest folders - maybe even predating OSX - so something changed in how these resources were stored or identified.
My only other note is that if you create a new folder, to get the right icon, and copy over all the contents, it is likely that your back up, or DropBox, or Carbon Copy Cloner will see this as a new item to be copied in its entirety, which may take time and possibly break recovery options. I don't know about Time Machine as I don't use it.
If you use the get info/copy&paste icon method, I don't think you get that issue and also, it's quicker .
Thank you for your hard work looking for a solution. This afternoon, before I saw your postings, I used Catalina Cache Cleaner from Northern Works to "Deep Clean" all the caches. That didn't work either. This is a real puzzle and I hope someone finds the solution eventually. At least there is no data loss. All the files are there. By the way, there are even sub folders with the generic icon. The only thing I've been able to do is create a new folder and then copy the files over and trash the old folder. This works but it's tedious, especially with lots of nested sub-folders. Also, this problem has only affected folders in the "Documents" folder. A cosmetic fix is to do a Get Info and paste a copy of the correct folder icon.
Thanks again for your effort.
Hello Bailey. You are welcome. I just spent over an hour doing the same thing as you. That is, creating new folders and subfolders, and then dragging everything into those new folders and subfolders. I agree. It was tedious. I really dislike monotonous, repetitive tasks. I don't know how many dozens of new folders and subfolders I had to create. :(
In my case, in addition to in the "Documents" folder, I also discovered a number of generic icons in my virtual host's folder in my web server, which resides in the "Applications" folder.
Given how hard I already tried, I seriously doubt that any of us regular end users will ever find a permanent solution to this, other than what you and I just did. We would have to know what the root cause is, in order to even know where to begin to find a solution. I suspect that Apple may some day silently fix this in some software update. Then again, maybe not. There are some issues folks have been complaining about for literally years which have never been fixed. So, there is that.
Off topic, but one of mine is the ability to copy all custom folders from the Mail app on my iMac to my iPhone, so that the mailbox hierarchy in both looks exactly the same. Right now, this is impossible to do. Only Apple's default folders in Mail are on both desktops, laptops and mobile devices.
I could be wrong, Jerry, but my suspicion is that this is some kind of Finder display bug in Catalina. What would be interesting is if one of your backups is a bootable backup, like what CCC makes. If you can boot your machine from one of those pre-Catalina backups, I wouldn't be surprised if you were to discover that those folders look their normal blue color. Again, just a guess on my part. But if true, it would certainly seem to confirm that it is some kind of Finder display bug specific to Catalina. Let us know. Thanks!
I am struggling with the same issue. For now I am copying the correct folder icon from a good one into the bad ones, but that is slow and tedious.
For anyone who isn't clear how that is done...
1) Click on a folder which is showing the correct blue icon.
2) Do a "Get Info" (command-I)
3) In the upper left corner click on the correct icon and the icon will be selected.
4) do a COPY (command-C)
5) Click on a folder which is showing the INCORRECT plain document icon.
6) Get Info (command-I)
7) Upper left click on the incorrect icon
8) Do a PASTE (command-V) and the correct blue folder icon will paste in.
repeat steps 5-8 on any other incorrect icons you want to correct. You do not need to re-copy the correct icon so long as it remains in your clipboard (so long as you haven't copied anything else since the blue folder icon).
Incidentally, for those not aware, you can use this trick to copy ANY icon you want to other icons. So you can make custom icons. I use it for my external drives where I find an icon that either matches the type of drive I am using or an icon that better represents what the drive is being used for rather than a generic USB drive icon.
I had changed quite a lot of the "document icons" back to blue folders manually, and then tried the finder relaunch. Every single of the folders I had fixed changed back to the generic document icon. Please can someone fix this problem!
Anssi1953, please see my instructions further back in this thread. Using that Terminal method, you can fix multiple -- dozens, hundreds or thousands -- of folders within minutes, simultaneously. Please note that there is one error in my instructions, which I was not able to edit, because it was too late to edit when I noticed it.
The string "xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo*" should actually be "xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo *" with a space after "com.apple.FinderInfo". This command will drill down to every file and folder below the folder you are currently in. It does work, and quickly.
Another way to do it is to simply type "cd" in the Terminal, leave a space, and then drop a folder into the Terminal window. After that, use the "xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo *" command to change all folders inside of that folder.
Hello Scotty,
There's hope. Unless Apple decided that custom icons are obsolete, they should still be there, it's just the current Catalina Finder that doesn't display them because of a bug. You can check in Terminal with:
ls -a path&nameofyourfolder
(easiest way to get that path&name into the command line is drag it from the Finder)
There should be an "icon?" file in the list, whose 'resource'-part contains the actual icon.
I can confirm -- as has already been discussed earlier in this thread -- that, yes, the issue appears to be directly related to the age of the folder.
Regarding CCC, I do CCC backups twice daily, and I have not noticed that occurring. Either that, or my iMac is sufficiently fast, that I just don't notice the time difference.
Folders with generic "document" icon
