SD Card not showing up in Finder Sidebar (other removable drives do) - Big Sur

This is what I suspected too. I have been using Macs professionally for over 20 years and never thought I would say this but I think Mac OS and other apps, like mail are going backwards now.

I naively called AppleCare support about this finder issue and they claimed to be concerned and looking into it. What’s the line again. “I can see why you would be frustrated with that and I would like to help you fix it. Of course, after wasting a hour of my time over two calls, the trail went cold.

Not good enough!

Mine has been doing the same thing and as I work from SD cards 99% of the time its really annoying me to the point where I'm about to return my new m1 pro and just switch back to my brick 2013 MPB which is actually running faster than this POS in almost every program including Photoshop, Lightroom, and Disk Utility.

I have had this problem and tried all the suggestions here. The problem was that there isn't a "devices" heading in the sidebar. There is a "Location" heading and if you put your cursor on that a tiny arrow head appears to the right of it pointing right to the main window, click the arrow and it points down (open) and reveals all the external devices.

The problem I am having is that this method doesn't work from the import dialog screen of Final Cut Pro X (an Apple pro app). This is where I usually download the contents of my SD cards, as you would expect. This PROBLEM is not good for productivity.

I actually have a SATA hard drive in a dock connected via USB 3, Shows in sidebar as it should in Catalina, when i boot into Big Sur (same Mac) it doesn't show.

I can't rename this Hard Drive like you guys unfortunately as it has certain music sample libraries on it that rely on the exact same path under both OS'

So if i change that the path will break and the Application won't find the library, so i'm kinda stuck here.

tried your suggestion did not work. card only appears in finder window if named within MacOS. If formatted within camera, the name is erased and the card will then no longer appear in finder unless renamed again.

adt113 wrote:

Same here. A temporary workaround is to rename the card from the desktop. Then eject and reinsert the card, and it will show up in the sidebar. There is a bug where Big Sur gets confused when a card has a default 'Untitled' name. I really hope this gets fixed in the next update as it has severely slowed down my workflow!

Also, When it is the first time mounting the drive, The USB Drive gets the default name 'NO NAME'. Happens when an SD Card is formatted as MS-DOS(FAT) when you didn't put a name in it.

I posted months ago about this issue and I can't seem to find that thread.

But after the last OS update, the issue seems to be resolved, at least for me.

I use Sony cameras and cards and reformat every time it goes in the camera for a shoot.

The cards now show up in the sidebar and my workflow is back to normal. Finally.

Hallelujah.

It seems to be working for most of us:

Have you run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up" or anti-virus apps on your Mac?

Same here on 2019 MBP 16".

Thanks - renaming the memory card on another machine fixed it for me.

Well, maybe it's just Sony cards that won't show up, then. They appear on the desktop all right, as "Untitled 1."

That's fine except if you have 30 SD cards.

I have the same issue with Big Sur: my external drives show up on the desktop, but not in the Finder sidebar. It's really annoying!

Try dragging the HD icons from the Desktop into the sidebar of a Finder window.