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

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.

Show View Options (⌘J) > Adjust Grid Spacing > Set as Default.

Decreasing it worked for me.

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.

After some experimenting I got my drive icons to lock in place.

Move drive icons to desire location

right click on desktop and sort icons "snap to grid"

move icons again and they will stop in another location that you do not want

set icons to location: "none"

move icons to desire location

set icons to "snap to grid"

Many steps which may not be required in this order but that is working for me.

Did you try the fix I posted that worked for me? No icons on your desktop can be even a little right of your hard drive icon. Moving my HD icon to the right edge of my screen fixed the problem. Good luck.

Running Sonoma on a Mac Studio, Studio Display, seven hard drives with the the same problem as others on this discussion. I have solved the issue at least for me. I placed all the hard drives in the upper right screen in a row, size 32 x 32, and grid spacing needle in the middle. I move the other 62 item on the desktop pds, pages documents, jpegs, folders, and InDesign documents, etc. to the left side of the screen and left them there. After multiple computer sleeping awakening even a restart over 3 days nothing has moved. 

I have since moved 9 folders in a row approximately 2 visual inches from the hard drives. The rest of the desktop items are spread out mainly on the left half of the screen a few on the right half. Hope you can make sense of my writing. Good luck.

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 there Lewis Kopp,

That is a strange thing to occur! Let's team up to help get this resolved. We'd like to start with learning more about what's happening, along with ruling out some possible causes:

1. When did this start?
2. Sometimes unexpected behavior can be resolved with a restart. Check out the section ‘Restart your Mac' here: Shut down or restart your Mac
3. To test for this in a new user, check out the steps under 'Add account' here: Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Cheers!

I'm having this issue on a brand-new Mac Studio running Ventura. So, it's not a Sonoma issue, as one commenter mentioned. It's also not related to Migration Assistant, because I did a completely clean install on this machine and did NOT migrate. I always use Snap to Grid, so for those who were using a different Finder setting, changing it *to* Snap to Grid likely won't fix it.

Just a month ago, this Mac Studio replaced a 2020 iMac that was also running Ventura, and this issue did not appear until I started using the Mac Studio. I also have a 2023 MacBook Pro, running Sonoma, that does NOT display this issue.

So, there appears to be no particular rhyme or reason—except in my case, out of three Macs, it's only happening on the Mac Studio.

To the commenter who disabled the display of external drives, it's fantastic that that works for you. But I have 5 drives, and I need to be able to see—at a glance—that they have all properly mounted. We all work differently of course.

For certain users, the keyboard shortcuts for sorting might work. They can be found in Finder > View > Sort By. (No, it shouldn't be necessary to hit a shortcut, but as a workaround until this is fixed, it's available.) Unfortunately neither of those works for me as any of the available options would change the desired order of my icons. But your needs may be different.

Apple really needs to fix this.

I have been suffering this annoying problem also. I only had speech start up automatically , deleted it and all seems ok once again - only tested it once thus far though

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?

Pretty sure TinkerTool can show invisibles if I recall. Worth a look (it's free) though I don't know about moving a DS file - keeping it out of the way... MacOS might want to keep replacing it to a default location. But then that's what the internal drive is supposed to do as well. :-/

After putting in correct location did you then set to "snap to grid" to lock position?

You need to move the drive icons close to where you want them BEFORE using snap to grid. Try putting them in the upper right corner first.