Mac is moving my drives icons on the desktop when I put it to sleep

Just read something which I thought might have been here, which seems to fiy with my latest workaround, and that is on wake/boot the desktop icons are larger than you have set them for, therefore they overlap and thus move. Then maybe a split second later, the system realises you want smaller icons, so it resizes them, but now is too late as it has already moved the icons.

I have moved everything to the left side of the desktop except my 6 drives, and I have moved them further (Farther) apart than they were (bigger gap between) and touch wood, nothing has moved for a while...

Post was by Joel Pro by the way, I'll copy and paste below image.

Mac is moving my drives icons on the desktop when I put it to sleep

I have a Mac Studio with the same issue.

based on watching my boot up closely when my monitor is awake I get the feeling the Mac goes through one of two things, either a “what are your screen dimensions?” cycle where it briefly defaults first to an assumed-but incorrect- screen size than I have set for my monitor, or it defaults briefly to an assumed- but incorrect - icon size setting that is bigger than the one I’ve chosen. In other words all my icons are - for a fraction of a second - larger than I have them set - either through temporarily incorrect screen dimensions or icon size settings.

In any event the result is that the icons - briefly - no longer fit where I placed them - they’d overlap so they reorder before the system realizes “oh you set your screen dimensions to THAT size!” Or “oh your icons are set to be smaller!”

If this is true, the order of events on wake up / boot up could be causing this. I have a third party external monitor. I assume the rest of us do too. So it might be taking a bit of time to communicate with the external monitor during which the Mac makes incorrect assumptions about what it has to do. which causes the reordering.

like I say I’m probably wrong. But I’ve seen my icons be too big for a fraction of a second and they scramble to new positions and then shrink back down.

anyone else see that?

Hey Lewis Kopp,

We appreciate you going through the steps provided. It's really helped. Since you created a test user account and the icons did not move locations, it sounds like there is a setting or app on the main user account that you use that could be conflicting with the icons moving. It could even be caused by a login item. Take a look at these steps to remove login items and see if it resolves the issue. Follow the steps for that here: Remove login items to resolve startup problems on your Mac - Apple Support. 

You mentioned a frustration with troubleshooting this. We can understand. If you would like, you can reach out to Apple Support if that method of support works better for you: Get Support.

Take care.

I too was getting annoyed that the drive icons on my desktop kept changing positions my Mac Studio. Here is a simple solution that works regardless of the order that the external drives mount. First, I positioned the external drive icons where I want them. By default, my boot SSD drive show ups in the upper right-hand corner of my desktop. I clicked on "View" in the menu bar and selected "Sort By" and then "Snap to Grid" and then adjusted the desired spacing. In my case, I have an external RAID array and four external drives (three hard drives and an external SSD). I started by creating numbered tags for the external drives (right-click on each desktop icon and select, "Tags..."). I numbered the RAID array with the tag, "1". Then I numbered the tag for one of my Time Machine backup hard drives as, "2". My other Time Machine backup drive's tag is, "3". A Carbon Copy Cloner hard drive's tag is, "4". Finally, an external SSD's tag is, "5". From "View" in the menu bar I then selected "Sort By" and then "Tags". Any other desktop file or folder icons appear to show up in alphabetical order. Of course, if there are any other icons that you want to have stay in place, you can tag them with other numbers. Regardless of the order that your external drives mount, they will always end up being displayed in your desired order!

The problem seems most sensitive to icon text size. In "Show View Options" on the Desktop, I find that, with snap-to-grid turned on, if I set the text size to 13 or smaller then the HD icons will stay where I put them. Otherwise, even if other icons are nowhere near, the HD icons will move. Adjusting icon size and grid spacing make almost no difference.

Apparently Apple recently changed the rules for the physical separation of HD icons from other icons to be excessively over-sensitive to the width of icon labels. As I recall, disk icons have always moved automatically if they were too close to others. But now that threshold has gone nuts, especially for the HD icons.

I posted what cured this for me quite a while ago, though I cannot take credit for this solution, it has 100% cured it for me. Apparently, as a Mac boots up or wakes from sleep, the icons are at the default setting, which is possibly larger than you have them set, so to the os as it boots, they are too close together and so it moves them. Then it realises that you want smaller icons & resizes them, but now it is too late, they have moved. So what worked for me, and Joel who posted the solution, was to move the icons slightly left (presuming they are on the right side of the desktop) and further/farther apart vertically, giving a larger gap. so as the os wakes up, there is space for them in their native larger size, thus it doesn't need to move them, and they stay where they are. I have actually just tried squashing them up a bit and setting sleep then waking, and yes they moved again, but with the increased gap all around them, for the last few/several months, they have stayed where they are. Hope this helps...

I posted what cured this for me quite a while ago, though I cannot take credit for this solution, it has 100% cured it for me. Apparently, as a Mac boots up or wakes from sleep, the icons are at the default setting, which is possibly larger than you have them set, so to the os as it boots, they are too close together and so it moves them. Then it realises that you want smaller icons & resizes them, but now it is too late, they have moved. So what worked for me, and Joel who posted the solution, was to move the icons slightly left (presuming they are on the right side of the desktop) and further/farther apart vertically, giving a larger gap. so as the os wakes up, there is space for them in their native larger size, thus it doesn't need to move them, and they stay where they are. I have actually just tried squashing them up a bit and setting sleep then waking, and yes they moved again, but with the increased gap all around them, for the last few/several months, they have stayed where they are. Hope this helps...

Tried replying a couple of hours ago, no idea why it isn't showing, apologies if it appears twice. I posted my solution to this a while ago, though I can't take the credit for it. When the OS comes out of sleep or boots, for a brief moment it sees everything at default settings, my icon are smaller than the default, so seeing mine larger means they will overlap in their current position, so the OS moves them. As the waken/boot continues, it realises that you want them smaller, so it resizes them, too late came the cry, it had already moved them. The answer for me was to firstly move slightly to the left (presuming they are down the righthand side,) then move them apart vertically, giving more space around them. Problem solved for me, few months ago now. I have earlier today bunched them up again, set sleep, waken up and they moved again... Hope this helps.

This is what I did to make ALL Icons remain where I wanted them and still be able to use Clean Up.

Click on View

Then Click on Show View Options.

In Stack By: & Sort By:  Choose None for BOTH!

Workaround Found!

Since this bug persists, I've now implemented a workaround using the app Keyboard Maestro (https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main) which places my icons back where they belong with the press of a keyboard shortcut. (It's also possible to have the task performed at startup or to trigger it in various situations on your Mac, such as when waking up from sleep or when a drive is attached, etc.)

The solution is a bit geeky (but not difficult) and requires a license for Keyboard Maestro, which I already owned and which I already use extensively to automate numerous things on my Macs. So, for me, it was just a matter of customizing the recommended macro to move my particular icons to the particular locations where they need to go. (Those variables will of course be different for each person.)

This solution took less than 5 minutes to set up and has worked 100% reliably for me for the last few months. If you're interested, the solution is described by user @August in this post:

https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/arranging-icons-in-finder-icon-view/33258/50?u=soundsgood

Near the end of the thread I thank him for pointing me in the right direction. My user name on that forum is @soundsgood.

Apple, I'll state this again: You really need to fix this bug.

I am sharing my temporary workaround in case anyone finds it useful. I agree that it is still an annoying problem that Apple needs to fix, but at least my frustration level has gone down. I have a Mac Studio running Ventura btw. Someone posted that on wake from sleep, the drive icons might temporarily default to a larger icon size, thus they get reshuffled when the system tries to fit them to the available slots on the desktop grid, resulting in them going to the bottom right of the screen sometimes. And yes there are a number of suggestions out there about not snapping to Grid etc. but they don't work for my workstyle. I like the snapping to grid, and I expect my drives to always be in the upper right of my desktop where my mouse hand automatically goes searching them (for decades now). So on a hunch, I placed my drive icons one slot over to the left from where I normally would have put them (see attached image) and now they stay put. It's not perfect, but at least the frustration of "where the heck are the drive icons now?" is gone. I've been using this for a couple of weeks and everything is staying in place. Wake from sleep, reboot, they are always there, just slightly shifted one column over to the left from where I would have wanted them.

Hi Jimi, if you go to page one of this thread, look for my post Normski4ash. This has worked for me and a few other people too. Basically move all drives a few millimeteres left of the edge of screen, then increase the gap between them. I currently have 8 drives that are lined up vertically along the right hand side of my screen. And those 8 drives take up the whole of the right side of my screen. see image. Mine haven't moved since I did this. Just increase the gap between and to the right of screen as you look at it. Hope this helps. If I bunch things up I can get 13 items in a line, but that's when they start moving, give them room to breathe...

Both my Mac Studio and my 2019 27" iMac with Sonoma had this issue. I was able to use the "snap to grid" to keep all icons in place. Never had to do this before.

Ignore my username, I'm using Ventura. That said, I just purchased a Mac Studio. It came with 13.6.3. And now that I'm using this the moving hard drive thing has started happening. Drives would relocate after waking up from "Sleep" and also after shut-down and restarts. (I have three drives on my desktop, my internal HD and two external drives). I've tried all the recommendations here, none have worked. Then updated MacOS to 13.6.4 and my drive icons still do their dance.

I also had about 20 other things on my desktop - files and folders - because I'm lazy and haven't filed them where they should be. So I thought to myself, "Hey, self, what happens if you take all the stuff on your desktop and, you know, put them on your hard drives where they are supposed to be? Have only the three drives icons on the desktop? What happens then?"

So, I cleaned all the stuff off my desktop leaving only my HD icons.

Guess what happened?

It has worked!!! Been 7 days so far, and drive icons are where I put them.

Try this, if you have other stuff on your desktop.

Cheers!

I have recently started getting this with my iMac, running latest Sonoma, that's why I am here, then I thought, what was the last program I installed. Western Digital drive utility, having a spot of bother with one of my drives, and there's also an uninstall wd drive utility, so I uninstalled it, et Voila ! problem solved, for me at least...