Files not showing up in Finder (Catalina)

Update: I did a Force quit on Finder and a reboot and my issue is gone (for 2 days now). I have also had Dropbox off most of that time, but not all (Dropbox isn't syncing some of the folder the issue has been in too). Dropbox seems to be using a crazy amount of CPU all the time. I feel like I need to wipe it and reinstall.

I had the same problem with PSE. I force closed finder and relaunched and they were there. Has not happened again.

>Click in the Apple in upper left corner

>Click force quit

>Select Finder

>Click Relaunch

Yes, I had the same issue and on my main hard drive.

Opened up a terminal window and navigated to the folder, hey presto, there they are.

Only when I restarted the machine did they appear. Something fishy going on here.

The only fix for this so far is to periodically relaunch the Finder. Right-click on the Finder icon in the Dock and select Relaunch or use the killall Finder command in Terminal.

good luck!!

Press Command + Alt + Esc and restart the Finder. It works and my hidden JPGs are back in the Finder! :)

Same symptoms here on Catalina 10.15.1 on a MacBook Pro with internal SSD formatted APFS.

I do use both Dropbox and iCloud but this is occurring in the Downloads folder which is not synced with either of those.

killall Finder or searching for the downloaded file by name with Spotlight does work as a workaround, but of course that's ridiculous. This is a bug and needs to be fixed.

I have an external drive and I use it, but not very frequently. It's now almost two weeks since I last plugged it in my macbook pro. So, yeah, restarting the Finder is the only solution for now (which, isn't a real solution, because in order to know when to restart -- you already must know that there is something the Finder is hiding from you).

yes it is horrible. I open the folder where I saved the file and then manually insert some file into it and then the saved files appear.

but I want to know how to solve this problem forever!?

I have this problem also - I can see the files using the terminal, but finder resolutely refuses to show the files. They were transferred on to the local directory from another computer, not produced locally. That software (logmein) can see the files as well.

I suspect if I wait an hour or two it might rescan or maybe restart the computer, but gee this is poor.

Same problem here with a mac mini 2018. The problem seem to occur when the file or the folder is created thru another application than the finder. Catalina is by far, the worst OS Apple has ever released.

> If you don't have BetterZip and have already tried....

I never had BetterZip on my system. And I am using DropBox continuously, before, during and after the Finder issue. I only had noticed the issue (discussed in this topic) once. I never again had it since stumbling upon it once. I think I had to reboot my machine to see Finder working properly again.

I am experiencing this problem too. its a major glitch-can someone PLEASE sort this out....

I have this same problem. For example, I created a folder in the terminal "mkdir ~/Desktop/example_directory". But, "open ~/Desktop" shows only:

I can see that the "example_directory" directory is there (via the terminal). But it's missing in the Finder.

All the other applications see those files/directories normally. For example "Open file" in Safari:

This is all very annoying. I have to jump to the terminal non-stop just to see what's in my "Downloads" or "Desktop" folders. And this isn't some weird edge-case bug, it's literally OSX not showing (normal) files and folders.

PS.