Catalina: Finder not refreshing with new items.

It has not worked fine for me with the previous version since couple of months ago. I used to remove list file it helped from time to time but not always... Today upgraded to Catalina and 30 minutes could not attach a file to a n email... nothing worked. The trick was to move it to Download and then drag and drop from Download icon on the dock bar... it's just frustrating such simple thing like file browser to not working and Shanna you may be right about the forum is for the users only but a simple message from Apple will save our time to go to a store for support.

Same issue here, multiple times a day. Also when trying to delete something from the desktop nothing happens, and forget about ejecting an external drive. Sometimes relaunching finder works, but usually not. The only option seems to be to restart the computer. This only started with Catalina update and is making things very frustrating.

Somehow in my mind I did not consider that Apple would establish the forum for users to help each other without their contribution. Maybe that is indeed the situation. It is useful to understand the breadth of the issue.

Kirk

Restarting with a fresh installation does not help! I had this problem with an old MacBookPro recently updated with Catalina and have the same issue with a bland new top of the range MBP 16 inch out of the box with a fresh install (not from the backup). It's a MacOS issue! Totally unreliable!!!

It would seem that I'm not the only one super annoyed with the macOS instability. Especially since this is happening on a large variety of hardware.

Having started my journey on Mountain Lion in 2013, my pride and confidence in Apple started going down hill since the release of Sierra and APFS. I left the other company (too much troubleshoot and not enough time using my system) for Apple but it seems that Apple is now becoming that other company. To add insult to injury, is Apple's denial and lack of transparency regarding the quality of their releases.

My hope and wish is that Apple stops adding more unfinished features on top of an already bug ridden OS's (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS) and releases these only once they are solid and ready. Emojis are nice and all (how many do I really need?) but not at the price of OS instability.

I have been using finder to sort and clean up some of my older files. As someone stated earlier, they hope that they haven't lost any files. I can confirmed that I did lose file transferring from one external SSD to another. Even Time Machine and the Snapshots weren't any help since the drive was now formatted before discovering the missing files. These were paper documents that I had scanned in order to get rid of the physical versions. Luckily I hadn't deleted my original ScanSnap Home versions or else I would have lost all of these permanently.

I do realize that the Apple ecosystem is much more complex now which it is why the need to slow down and focus on stability. Please let's go back to it just works.

Same issue here on 3 separate machines (16" MacBook Pro 2019, and 2 15" MBP Touchbar early 2017). Seems to happen most often for me when a file or directory is created by another app (in my case, Lightroom or Photoshop). Finder will not show the new files/directories until it is relaunched or computer is restarted.

This is a major disruption to workflow and I hope Apple can acknowledge and fix this asap.

After updating to 10.15.2, I am still experiencing file management issues. My latest is the preview icon not appearing on newly created files and no amount of Finder plist deletion has been able to fix any of these annoyances.

This release seems more towards fixing the new Catalina feature bugs rather than focusing on the ongoing core issues that have been plaguing the macOS for the last 4 years or so.

Now we wait for 10.15.3 in hopes that they eventually reach or get closer to the bottom of the bug barrel.

Luis does make a great point about the troubleshooting steps to try first which is what the Apple Support Community is for. Unfortunately, there are still many who have posted in this thread that we have tried these unsuccessfully.

One of the time consuming steps (last ressort) that was not mentioned here is a clean install. However, if this has to be done more and more frequently, then the issue lies in the OS stability and not the users.

I have been following Apple development since Mountain Lion and their recommendations with each OS release with the latest being the end of 32-bit support which was announced a few years back and has been delay until now. I also make sure that crash reports are sent to Apple for review.

Apple has a great ecosystem that has evolved from storing files locally to everything being synced in the cloud. That being said, macOS has seen many changes as well since its switch to Intel base processors. The biggest was when the file system went from HFS+ to APFS.

As for the media, they focus on the very current and to what appeals to the masses. So something like file system issues would seem rather boring to say for example the release of the Mac Pro. When I did a web search on this issue, I came across many articles which ended in finding this thread.

While I agree that corrupt files can be an issue, I do not think this is the case here.

BTW: The media has recently reported that Apple is reviewing how it does triage and prioritizes bug reports in the wake of the iOS 13 release. My iPhone got so hot that I though it was going to burst into flames and this was finally fixed in iOS 13.3.

Thanks Old Toad for the recommending EtreCheck. Fantastic App! I had heard about it but never tried it so I downloaded from the App Store and tried it then purchased it to unlock the rest of the features. Except for 2 plist files from apps that were previously removed, my MacBook Pro has a clean bill of health.

Unfortunately, Finder issues remain.

I have looked at it in BBEdit (copy/paste) and it isn't that long. If you could point out what to specifically look for (i.e. Sections, Loaded, Not Loaded,...), I could look at it more closely because nothing really stands out as being out of place.

Thanks

I'm also having this problem, on a new Macbook Pro 13" running Catalina (10.15.1). Finder + the Desktop often do not update with new files, however I can see them in Terminal (using ls or find). Relaunching Finder seems to fix this.

Currently helping a co-worker fix this same issue.

Brand new (2 day old) MBP 16" 2019, has 10.15.1.

Computer literally has next to nothing installed at the moment, only Creative cloud suite and Capture One V9 and V20.

Nothing is populating within finder unless I force find the file (Show in Finder) through the Capture One system which then seems to only recognize the individual file.

Purposely holding off on going to 10.15.2 due to already know compatibility issues with C1 so seeing if the update fixes the problem only will create another problem.

Based on my experience, I wouldn't worry about a clean install for this issue as it did not fix it for me. I had another reason for a clean install, so it wasn't a wasted effort. But a clean install that doesn't fix the problem would have just meant a wasted day for me... But your mileage may vary, of course.