Finder in macOS Ventura has no file types - every file listed as 'other'

I 'upgraded' to Ventura a couple of days ago. Mostly it's more of the same, but now my Finder is a mess.


Every file format is now listed as 'other', so all my documents, photos, audio files, videos, apps,, etc. are all in one long messy list. The only things it recognises are folders.


I've gone into individual file properties and these are correct. I've gone into the Finder view options and tried to arrange everything by name and kind, but that did nothing. I've relaunched finder, I've restarted the Mac, but nothing makes any difference.


Is this just me, or is this a common issue? I can't find any other threads about this so thought it best to ask. I can't stand the lack of organisation, it makes finder unusable.


Here are a couple of grabs to show that I mean. Thanks for any suggestions.


iMac

Posted on Dec 31, 2022 4:09 AM

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14 replies

Jan 2, 2023 2:25 AM in response to Barney-15E

That raised an interesting point. Because I don't use Siri or Spotlight, all the tick boxes in Spotlight search results were unchecked.


Once I checked a few boxes, those file types started to be recognised again in Finder.


That's quite a strange system, and odd that those boxes being unchecked had that effect, because I've not manually unchecked them in Ventura, and the file system worked initially but fell over after a day or so.


Anyway, you put me on the right path, and I found a solution, so thanks for the help.

Feb 16, 2023 7:37 AM in response to moses quest

My advice?


Downgrade back to Monterrey.


I've upgraded 4 of my 7 Macs to Ventura, and have lived to regret it. On all 4, search is ruined. Totally inconsistent thru Mail, Messages, Spotlight, Notes, everywhere. I had to live with a lot of spinning beach balls. Notes routinely crashes on all 4 machines, a dozen times a day. Laptop, iMac, M1 Mac Mini, it makes no difference.


Apparently with Ventura, Apple stopped worrying about quality control and just decided to push marketing buzz features, stability be ******.


I backed up the main drive using Time Machine, made a bootable USB flash drive installer for Monterrey, booted from it, used the Disk Utility to nuke Macintosh HD from orbit, and reinstalled Monterrey. Sucked all my data back into it with Migration Assistant and am not going to look back. Search, Notes, Messages, Mail & the Finder all working perfectly again.


I'll leave one of them that isn't mission critical with Ventura installed, just to see if any future updates make the OS remotely usable, but until then, I won't budge from Monterrey. It's rough spots are few, but Ventura's is legion.

Dec 31, 2022 5:13 AM in response to Randall_2023

Just seen this. I don't use tags, so probably not that. I deleted my com.apple.finder.plist file from library, but that didn't do anything.


I notice some fairly basic yet very useful settings that were part of system preferences, such as a shutdown and startup schedule, have now usefully been moved to only being accessible via Terminal, so I'll conclude that Ventura is a bug-filled update that's not especially user friendly, and that I will now have to look at patching things and using workarounds to get the performance that used to be part of the OS.

Jan 1, 2023 7:47 AM in response to Barney-15E

Your problem has nothing to do with scheduling shutdown nor the redesign of System Preferences.

I know.


I'm just pointing out that since moving to Ventura, features that were standard on previous versions of macOS are no longer included in a convenient manner and now require the user to have the ability to add commands in Terminal.


To me, Ventura isn't an upgrade, as it hasn't added anything I've found to be worthwhile, but it has removed lots of useful features I used often, while the most basic functions no longer seem to work as they should.


I don't use Spotlight or Siri, so there was nothing indexed to rebuild. All files still show as 'other'.

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Finder in macOS Ventura has no file types - every file listed as 'other'

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