Thumbnail pictures not showing up on external hard drive after downloading OS Sonoma

It's fixed! Do Sonoma 14.3 update and it works! A shout out to Yxjou for letting me know about the update!

So I tried re-formatting a thumb-drive in disk utility and selected Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (the other option in the dropdown is Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive Journaled)) I assume this is APFS (I feel like in older models it actually said this)?

Anyway, I then took one of the files on my external drive and dragged it to the re-formatted drive and it does the same as what happens if I drag it to the desktop, it remains as the generic icon. I then added art to the file thumbnail (within the thumb-drive) and it accepted the art file. Then, I dragged the file onto the desktop and the artwork remains. I then replaced the file dragging it back to the thumb-drive and the art still remains (It worked).

So, it seems the solution has the caveat that you must add the (new) artwork to the file in order for this to work. Which is fine (for new files), however I have nearly 5000 files with existing artwork in the thumbnails and I can't very well redo all of those files to fix this.

This all seems to suggest that whatever the old format of my thumbnail files is, is no longer compatible with OS Sonoma?.🤔

Clydesdale22,

Saw your reply this morning and wanted to let you know I have not found a solution either and it does appear that Apple has no intention of fixing this. Read: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255318797?sortBy=best I don't entirely understand this but it sounds like there's a fundamental change that has occurred where "the FAT (ms-dos) driver was also changed ." So as has been mentioned by others it has to do with the EX-FAT format no longer being fully (?) compatible with finder...?

Anyway, I've been giving this a lot of thought and my previous experiment with a flash drive (explained elsewhere in this thread) leads me to believe the only solution (which will be time consuming) is to revert back to OS Ventura, then reformat a drive (I have two copies of everything on two separate drives) to APFS then copy everything from the other drive (still formatted EX-FAT with everything showing (icons)as it should again) onto the APFS formatted drive, then re-update back to OS Sonoma 🤯. Now I should have one drive that show's my icons properly (APFS) and one that does not (EX-FAT) but is still able to be used on PC.

I haven't actually done this though, so who knows if will actually work and it's a lot of effort to fix something that I didn't break. A note to Apple developers (if they even read these conversations): I understand changes get made but if there's a change being made that will adversely affect how things operate, it would be helpful to state that in the update description so we have advance warning of such issues.

I haven't yet decided to try this because I'm hoping (probably in vain) that Apple will fix this at least for Sonoma so that we all have a chance to make the necessary changes prior to this type of "upgrade" rather than have to retroactively fix it.

More information regarding thumbnail images not showing up:

Was just moving a newly created file which I added an image to the file and it showed up just as it should as a thumbnail image on the desktop. However when I dragged this file to my external drive the image disappeared and defaulted back to the generic file icon. Note: The image was showing throughout the downloading process, it only vanished after the file was completely downloaded.

This is confounding, and so far it looks like myself and one other person seems to have this issue (or is sharing it) any help would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, my username was a reference to the auto suggestion generated when I was creating my account years ago, I've tried to change it but apparently it's not possible. I'm not a combative person, was just annoyed that I couldn't pick a username that I wanted.

Thanks

I had wondered if that might be the issue, and yes I do need to be able to share it with windows as my business parters uses windows. I think it would make sense to try a disk formatted to AFPS but it would complicate sharing, so if that were the only solution then I'd probably just live with it the way it is.

Obviously I don't have to have the icons, but I have invested a lot of time adding the clip art to the files and it does help me locate them more quickly. For now, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the folks at Apple will be able to put a fix in the next update- and if not, I may have to live with it.

I will however do an experiment with a flash-drive (format it to APFS) and see if that fixes the issue as I agree this this is likely the issue. Will share the results...

Thank you 🙃

I may do the same or this may be what drives me to another system. This- does not play well with others nonsense has always been my main gripe against Apple and I've been using Mac computers for over twenty years...

Thanks for that information. I probably won't be going back to Ventura anytime soon, mostly because last time I had to revert back to an older OS it was a huge hassle and I don't have the time or patience for that, and I feel like if Apple breaks something through an update it should be 100% on them to fix it rather than putting the burden on their paying customers.

I'm an electrician by trade, imagine if I went into their headquarters to fix a lighting contactor and when I was done the outlets switched off instead of the lights, then told the programmers to just deal with it... How well would that go over. Maybe not the best analogy but I think the point is made.

That last part was for Apple in case anyone from there actually reads this.

Same for me. It's random and seems to depend on the number of files I have in a folder. It acts like I don't have enough RAM (I have 16GB). I don't know what the problem is but I did notice if I take one of the files that aren't displaying the added icon art and drag it to the desktop it then shows the art. If this problem persists I may just break down and convert one of my backup drives to APFS and then copy the EX-FAT drive to it. Then I should (theoretically) have a copy that works as it used to 🤔.

Of course it would be nice just to have things work properly. Like before it was broken in the update.