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

What has worked for me for 10 days or 2 weeks. Select all your hard drives and move them out of the way downward and to the left. Select the hard drive you want in the upper right. Select it, hold down the Command key and drag to desired location. Release key. Select next hard drive, hold down Command key and drag to desired location. Normally under first hard drive. Follow the same procedure for all your hard drives. Now all are in a nice row in the upper right. Mine, all 7, are approximately 1/2 inch apart staying where I put them.. Do not put any other file under the row, that will cause 1 or 2 to move. Cheers

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.

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!

Mac Studio M1 Ultra with Sonoma 14.1.1 has this issue. Issue started when I upgraded to Sonoma.

2019 Mac Pro - clean install of Ventura. Been happening to me for ages too. How on earth does apple not fix these things when they can see these support threads? It can't be a difficult fix surely?

Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus. I'm having this very annoying issue too, with volume icons not staying put. FYI I’m on a Mac Studio running Sonoma 14.4.1 with dual screens.

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...

It doesn't move any files I have on the desktop but it keeps moving the hard drive and any peripheral dives I have connected. It didn't do this until the last update from OS 4.0 to OS 4.5.

I have been on Big Sur since Jan 2023 attaching 3 disks over Thunderbolt being mounted on my Desktop without any problems. This past weekend (9/9/23) I upgraded to Ventura 13.5.2 and now I'm having similar problems as described above. Last night I moved all the drives to where I wanted them to reside and shutdown. When I powered up my Mac mini M1, they showed up where I left them. However the first time the screen saver came on for more than 20 seconds, they all moved again. Most of the time they all move over the Macintosh HD icon, while other times, depending on where I select the initial placement, they go to another part of the screen very consistently. I should note that 3 of the drives are really a partition on a single large HD.

Finally I should point out that the 3 top most "slots" (for lack of a better name) on the right side of the screen seem to stay consistently in place. I currently have Macintosh HD (#1), followed by my raid (#2) and finally by one of the partitions off of the large HD (#3) and they seem to stay in place. If I move slot 2 icon after slot 3 to slot 4, then after the sleep it will overlay Macintosh HD in slot 1.

From my playing around with this, its beginning to look like the code that decides where to place a new file on the Desktop so that it doesn't overlay any other file has been changed between Big Sur and Ventura and only affects mounted disks/partitions.

Actually this morning, one of my drives has moved again ! I have obviously the internal drive and 5 others, photographer, so everything backed up several times, which makes it a 5 minute task every morning ! Come on Apple, bit of help please...

My workaround is to not show drives on the desktop. I like the wallpapers and don't want to clutter up the view.

It's just too simple to keep stuff off the desktop and open Finder (or use the dock icons I put there for oft-used files) to access a drive or file.

But of course that's just me ... YMMV.

New Tac. So I have moved everything on my desktop over to the left of screen, it's not a lot, but now it's out of the way. My 6 drives I have lined up, one above the other, they used to occupy two rows of three, now one row of 6. Second day and they are behaving.

Doesn't help Lewis though ! his were in a straight line to begin with...

Is there a "Physical" size for a desktop icon ? when I tried to arrange everything else, over on the left of screen, some of them wouldn't go into line, they jumped to the right of line one, as if into the second line..., When I snapped to grid, then back to none, they lined up in a nice single row...

My Mac M2 Studio is doing this also. DId it on my old 4k displayport monitor and also on my new 5k apply 27 studio display. It is only my icons in the bottom left corner doing it. Drives me crazy. I have done all you guys suggested and no luck. Did a timemachine migration to this computer a few months ago from my older m1 studio and then moved that computer somewhere else here. Not sure if that has something to do with it. The m1 does not do this. I am almost thinking of wiping this computer and starting again.

If you haven't solved this problem yet, the below worked for me:

IF THERE ARE ANY ICONS ON YOUR DESKTOP TO THE RIGHT OF WHERE THE HARD DRIVE ICON IS THEN MOVE THEM FARTHER TO THE LEFT AWAY FROM THE HARD DRIVE ICON.