Mac OS folder icon problem

Immediately after upgrading to Catalina, HUNDREDS of my folder icons have been replaced by text-file-style icons. Tech support suggested I manually paste in the proper icons one at a time using the "Get Info" for each of these several hundred folders, or replace the folders one at a time manually with identical new folders because mine had become "corrupted". This would take me a few days.

Obviously Apple screwed up somewhere.

Here is an example of what I see in the Finder for one of my folder's contents. The folders within it that have their own contents are indicated by the gray triangles on the right edge. As you can see, several do not have proper folder icons. These are just a few of hundreds:

I speculated that it may be the age of the folders (which is no excuse for them) but this proved not to be the case. Below are the "Get Info" for two folders, the newer one has no icon, the older one does:

Apple owes us a proper solution, not one that entails hours of extra work!

Are you talking about a Finder window? On the left side of window (the shortcuts) or the main part of the window on the right? Can you post a screen shot so we see what exactly you're seeing?

Good luck...

Have you upgraded your Mac to macOS Catalina, a full upgrade like this will restore any previously customised icons to their default. You will have to create them again.

Select the folder you want to change, press Command-i to get. the info panel up.

Open the replacement icon in Preview, click on Edit in the menubar and click on Select All, again from the menubar select Copy.

Go to the info panel and click to highlight the icon on the top left of the info panel, and press Command-V.

I reported this Catalina bug a few beta releases back. The response was they couldn't find a cause for it.

The only way to fix it (so far) is to create a new folder and move all of the items from the old folder into it. Delete the now empty folder with the incorrect icon. Rename the new folder to the old folder's name.

Yup. A pain. I've got a lot of old folders like that. The plus side is it doesn't affect anything other than looks.

Doesn't Apple know about this problem already? It seems Kurt reported it.

My folder icons are the ones that are created whenever I create a new folder, they are not custom icons.

Does someone at Apple want to volunteer to change all my folder icons?

This is THEIR fault, not mine. Apple needs to provide a fix or else come to my place and fix the hundreds of folder icons that have gone missing!

I can confirm this is a problem on my new iMac 27", I updated from Mojave to Catalina a few weeks ago and several of my custom folder icons disappeared. I wanted to update a folder icon for a folder used by Hazel. I tried using a png file of the correct dimensions and file specifications (1024 px). When I would drag the image file to the Get Info folder icon in the titlebar, the image would flicker once to display my new folder icon, and then switch to a file icon. I could not get the new folder icon image to "stick". I then visited an online website that converts .PNG to .ICNS format and tried again but no luck.

Then I created a new folder and changed the folder icon with no trouble. So it seems the issue is Catalina prevents folders created long ago under the older OS, to accept new folder icons.

The work-around is to create a new folder, change the icon, and move your content to the new folder, then delete the old folder.

Hey Apple, I suggest you add this test-case to your SQA testing. This seems to be a regression bug.

Sorry, I wasn't clear in my initial response. Or even in line with the same thing described in the initial post.

I thought the issue being referred to was in the betas, and the initial 10.15.0 releases of Catalina. Old folders would appear with an icon of a white, dog-eared piece of paper instead of the default blue folder. That has been fixed in 10.15.1.

I have no problem pasting any custom I want to a folder, but don't have a suggestion for the loss of custom icons caused by the installation of Catalina.

I think you're missing the point, we know how to change icons, were saying it does not work any longer for us.

Well that is not the case for everybody. Perhaps you could try installing it again.

If you want Apple to know your problems, tell them,

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Well that method still works here for me.

Sometimes Apple can't fix things so they break something new or disallow it.