Custom icons for folders have disappeared.

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Level 1

4 points

Custom icons for folders have disappeared.

I customized many of my folders with custom icons, such as—

Now everyone has reset to their default appearance—

Recently I had disabled my iCloud account because emails in the mail app wouldn't stop repeatedly copying themselves. The emails stopped auto-copying. Then I re-enabled my iCloud account and restarted iMac. Desktop and document folders were gone. After a while they came back—without their icons.

Any suggestions for how to get them back would be greatly appreciated!

iMac 27″, macOS 11.7

Posted on Apr 25, 2023 1:54 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

John Galt

Level 10

161,788 points

Apr 26, 2023 4:56 AM in response to jennieimac

Apparently you enabled Desktop and Documents in iCloud: Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive - Apple Support. Nothing wrong with that, but custom icons are not stored in iCloud.

The only way you're going to get them back is to restore the affected folders from a Time Machine backup created prior to disabling the iCloud sync. Presumably those folders will only be ~/Desktop, and ~/Documents. (two folders). Try that.

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Answer 2

Apr 26, 2023 5:33 AM in response to jennieimac

your situation is why I have saved all my custom icons inside a folder in my home folder. I don't use iCloud, but I do know that sometimes with macOS updates and / or upgrades, some folders revert to the standard blue folders. so when that happens, I just open my custom icon folder and add them back in the same way that I changed them the first time.

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Custom icons for folders have disappeared.

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