Lion Keeps Re-arranging my Folders

My icons are also moving around. I do note that saving a file will move icons around. I have only a few folders where the icon location is important. After ensuring the icons in a folder are positioned correctly, I go to that folder in terminal and type

sudo cp .DS_Store DS_Store

I provide my password and the command makes a copy of the .DS_Store file into DS_Store. Now when the icons move around, I can easily restore the desired locations. It is a pain but it works for me.

My partner is very visual. He will clump files together based on a common theme. The files can be photos, text, e-mail clippings, etc. Lion rearranges everything in a near random timeframe.

What I founf works is:

1) I have Finder show the folder's hidden file, specifically the DS_Store file. Other places on the web will detail this.

2) I use Time Machine to go back to a time when the icons were still in order.

3) I restore just the DS_Store file.

4) I cloae the window and reopen and everything is back to the way it was.

I hate this work around. Apple Care was useless.

Thanks to everyone!

I'm having the same problem. It is really devastating to my work patterns. As long as I can remember --back to my Mac 512KE, circa 1986-- I have been able to depend on "icon view" positioning stability to arrange my work. This is fundamental to the Mac's desktop metaphor.

I'm trying the fix quoted by Eddie Prior1 in this thread: Set View --> View Options to Arrange by: NONE. I'll report back my results in a few days.

In the meantime, has anyone characterized the re-arrangement? Is the rearrangement always the same? (I seem to see an alphabetic sequence and evenly-spaced rows-and-columns result.) If you don't have this problem, can you create similar icon rearrangements by a specific Finder setting or sequence? (Probably, but not necessarily, involving the View Options window.)

I note that the linked-to videos seem to indicate that using a Save dialog seems to be the trigger for icon re-arrangement. It might be helpful to discover more details. Is this the only trigger anyone has noticed? Is it sufficient to use a Save dialog, or is it necessary to change views (say, from list to icon view) within the Save dialog? Or what?

Keeping the "View Options" window open, I note that the View Options window shows settings for the current window. (I had not noticed this before -- historically, I have rarely needed to change these settings.) Looking now at a folder that's been mal-rearranged in the last day or so, I note that the Sort By and Arrange By selections are both "NONE". But that's the suggested "fix" setting per the above. Can anyone comment on the scope of these settings? Can changing the value for a given folder in any case change the value for subfolders? Someone suggested making the the change to "NONE" with no windows open at all. Is this documented as the way of achieving a global change?

I think it is risky to fool around with invisible files like .DS_Store. (That's one good reason they are invisible!) That said, I tried renaming the file (to "foo") to see if this led to the mal-rearrangement. I found that MacOS (probably Finder) seems to instantly re-create .DS_Store, identical or close-to the previous one. Finding that the system is so interested in maintaining this file, I'm even more reluctant to mess with it.

Wild speculations: (1) Since I've installed 10.7, I've noticed a few strange permissions problems. Could mal-rearrangement be a result of such an issue? (2) Could slight corruption of .DS_Store files be the issue?

I have seen some constancy in the rearrangements but have not learned anything from it. I have reworked several folders testing the theory that some of my folders are corrupted. A long time back, I could not get my Applications icons to sit still. I solved the problem by booting up in another drive, creating a new folder next to the original Applications folder, moving my applications to the new folder, renaming the original Applications folder and finally renaming the new folder to Applications. A number of passwords were required. The icon locations in the new Applications folder stayed where they were I put them. I am doing this with some folders in my Lion OS. Time will tell if this works this time. A corrupted folder in this circumstance is more than a bad .DS_Store file. For the record, icon locations and other properties are stored in the .DS_Store file.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I am not quite sure what you mean by a corrupted folder. Long time back or recently: Did you run the MacOS Disk Utility Verify, or Unix fsck? If so, what indications of problems did you see? Did you attempt repairing with either? I very recently ran the MacOS Disk Utility Verify and it didn't find any significant errors. I guess I could haul out my copy of DiskWarrior and see what it says. But my gut feeling is that the filesystem is not corrupted in the current cases. As I recall, the 10.7 install program does a target disk verification first. I would hope it would find any corruption.

As the icon locations are stored in .DS_Store in each folder, it might be useful to imagine what might be going on with it.

Some process --for example, the standard file Save dialog-- might be stepping on .DS_Store files. I can't imagine why the Save dialog would have any reason to write to .DS_Store files while tree-traversing. Maybe there's an obscure case in which that ends up modifying and possibly corrupting .DS_Store files. The next step is finding a method of validating particular .DS_Store files. I haven't found one yet. (I did find an Applescript that reads and saves the current desktop icon positions --and is capable of restoring them-- said by the developer to be easily modifiable to apply to any folder.)

My hunch: the .DS_Store files aren't being stepped on -- not directly, anyway. I'm guessing that the process that ordinarily updates .DS_Store when one modifiies the View Options window is being triggered erronously, with default parameters, which are very unlikely to be what any particular person wants. The mal-rearranged windows seem entirely consistent, though, so I'm guessing that the .DS_Store files were properly updated -- with wrong data.

This is no more than wild guesswork on my part! But in the absence of more information, and with the importance of finding a way past this problem for those of us affected by it...

I don't know what a "corrupted" folder is in detail except that it goes beyond just something to do with the .DS_Store file. I have seen the issue with the Save, Save as and Open dialogue boxes when I want to find a location. I typically use the column view in these dialogue boxes when navigating around. I will know in a day or so if recreating the folder has had any effect on keeping icon locations fixes.

My work around is to keep a copy of the .DS_Store file and use it to restore icon positions by overwriting the bad .DS_Store file.

Thanks for your reply.

As far as I know, fundamentally, a MacOS "folder" is 100% equivalent to a Unix "directory". (The .DS_Store mechanism is added on top of all this to support the added features of MacOS.) Corruption could occur at this level, but it seems very very very unlikely -- Unix is time-tested, well-characterized, and about as solid as one can get.

I don't have enough experience yet to see any pattern. I'd like to discover more about what navigating around --and changing views-- in Save, Save As, and Open dialogs might do. You aren't the only one who suspects these triggering mal-reorganization of icons.

Hmmm, speculating again: We all installed 10.7 recently. If 10.7 changed the format of .DS_Store, the install procedure might go through all directories at install time and adjust all of these files accordingly. Or, I think more likely, at the first user access of a particular folder after installing 10.7, MacOS could detect "old-style .DS_Store" and update at that time. I'm wondering if there is a glitch with the installation that, say, poorly translates the old-style icon arrangement specification and somehow interferes with correct adjustment.

The question is: Once you find a directory that's been mal-reorganized, is there anything that you can do to permanently fix it? Some posts here and elsehwere seem to offer hope, while others say the problem returns later. (It isn't clear if the problem returns to the same directory, or simply shows up in other directories later.) Who knows, maybe there's a sequence of settings you can do in the View Options window that works more permanently than simply setting both "Arrange by" and "Sort by" to "None"?

My root HD window got mal-rearranged twice already. I've applied the "Arrange by" and "Sort by" to "None" fix and I will try to get back to doing normal work, re-opening and checking that window often. Let's see what happens...

As near as I can remember, folders opened correctly after I installed 10.7 over 10.6.8. After problems occurred, I did a clean install but that did not fix anything as the problem likely occurred when I read my old stuff into the new OS. So far, I have not found a fix. I have recreated folders by renaming the old folder, making a new folder with the old name and copying the folder contents from old to new. I do the last step by dragging folders inside the old folder to the new. I don't try to drag them all at once. This should create a new folder structure and .DS_Store folder with whatever new formats are required. This has not solved the problem. I tentatively conclude that the new 10.7 finder may have a bug or two. Maybe not, read on....

I just did an experiment. I opened my system hard drive and my icons were ok. The "Always open in icon view" is also set. I opened Adobe Photoshop and browsed to a file in my Pictures folder using column view. I opened the file and closed it. When I reopened my system hard drive by double clicking it, it was in list view. "Always open in list view" was set. I changed it to icon view and the locations were correct and "Always open in icon view" was reinstated without any help from me.

I repeated the experiment using BBEdit, a text editor. Everything worked ok. Icon view stayed icon view and my hard disk folder icons did not move. Thus, the problem is application dependent. OS 10.7 has introduced automatic saves for applications that want to. Perhaps, some applications that use the old system calls in the old ways are not quite doing things correctly when they use system calls to save, etc. files. It might not be an Apple problem but a compatibility problem with some applications. Of course, there is no rule that there is only one cause. With all the changes in OS 10.7, there could be multiple issues.

For the record, I always use arrange by none and sort by none and the problem remains.

Thanks for your post. It is upsetting that "Always open in …" changes without help from the user. That should simply NOT be possible.

I think the problem must be in the 10.7 Finder, mostly because, commonsensically because there should be no way an application can affect icon placement. That's the Finder's job.

The system calls used by applications _should_ be exactly the same as before. It is difficult to accept that the pros at Apple wouldn't be very careful to maintain backward compatibility.

Here's an experiment I started yesterday: I left my HD root folder set for icon view with Arrange By… and Sort By… both set to "none" and I arranged the icons in my customary way, which puts the System folder at upper left. I closed it and I've been checking it periodically since then. At least once, maybe twice, I've found the System folder displaced all the way to top right of the window. All other icons seemed unaffected.

I tried to do some work yesterday and today, besides exploring this issue (<very sad grin>,) and here's what I observed, as briefly as I can:

Yesterday I opened a folder deep in my HD hierarchy, call it "Sam", a folder I have not opened for many months. "Sam" is part of a s/w app support library and it opened in icon view, apparently just as it was installed, no special icon arrangement, just a single row across the top of the window. I copied some files to "Sam" from another directory, "Fred". "Fred" was in icon view arranged according to my customary scheme. I noted that the copied file icons retained their exact source arrangement in "Sam". In other words, when I closed "Sam" yesterday, it was "correctly" arranged in icon view, two new rows below the original top row.

Today I navigated to "Sam" and found it was still "correctly" arranged in three rows just as when I did the copy yesterday. No problem.

I closed "Sam" and then a few seconds later, I re-opened it. The ONLY operation I did in the meantime is that I navigated to the next most enclosing folder, i.e., two levels up from "Sam", by using Go --> Enclosing Folder. Since I've got Finder set to "Always open folders in new window", both windows stayed open.

What I found in "Sam": Strangeness, as if .DS_Store has been corrupted. In icon view only some of the files were visible and I could neither resize or scroll up/down or left/right to view them all. In list view the left-hand column --the filenames-- was invisible, off-window to the left, and I could find nothing to correct this. After playing around for a while with no success I closed "Sam" and used Terminal to rename Sam's .DS_Store to "old.DS_Store". Then I re-opened "Sam" and all seemed OK… uncorrupted. In icon view my arrangement was gone. I tried several different views, leaving it in list view.

Minor additional strangeness: I noticed the renamed .DS_Store file wasn't visible. "old.DS_Store" should have been visible in the MacOS window but wasn't. I made a copy named "foo" -- no help. I copied it to "aaaaaa" on the desktop -- still invisible. Conclusion: there's more than meets the eye here, maybe an obscure or new "invisible" file attribute on top of the leading dot to make files invisible. Probably this isn't relevant to the current discussion.

Really staggering strangeness: After all this, I was preparing to try to reproduce the problem. Just for grins, one last time, I decided to check "Sam" in icon view. Yesterday's "correct" icon arrangement was back! Three rows and spacing, to the best of my recollection, just as I left it yesterday.

Yesterday's icon arrangement should not have survived my renaming of .DS_Store in that directory. And I did a lot of experimenting with the View Options settings first, which almost certainly changed the organization. Incredible! I cannot think of any reasonable explanation for the reappearance of the correct icon arrangement.

Here's a completely off-the-wall possibility: 1) 10.7 automatically saves backups of .DS_Store files, often. 2) The .DS_Store in "Sam" _was_ corrupted between the first and second time I viewed that folder today. 3) 10.7 is now capable of detecting the corruption and restoring .DS_Store from the last non-corrupt version.

If this is so (ha!) then people experiencing mal-rearrangement should be able to recover by immediately deleting (renaming) .DS_Store, but that doesn't seem to be what you or anyone else observes.

I can't even argue that the window problems I observed today are related to the icon mal-rearrangement issue at all, since the icons I could see were correctly arranged.

Sheesh.

I'm experiencing this apparently random problem too, but have no theories on its cause. It's very annoying!

I'm just trying to be patient in the hope that Lion 10.7.1 fixes it.

Bill

We have partitioned our i7 8Gb 2011 Mini and installed Snow Leopard on it because Lion is useless to us as it really destroys our workflow. When it gets fixed we will migrate back.

I had a long conversation with Apple support and tried a lot of things, including reinstalling lion. Still the same problem: icons changes positions and size. The support people I talked to, had never heard about it.

It makes you wonder where Apple support is coming from. There have been quite a number of messages about this issue. Of course, this could be an active issue in the development community. It does likely speak to a lack of communication within Apple. Of course, no one likes to admit to or talk about serious problems particularly when there is likely no current fix.

I couldn't agree more.

Tage

I commented earlier that I think it is inexcusable that on an Apple-hosted forum there is never a comment from Apple.

They must (and they do) read these comments - if it is a problem, would it be so bad to actually admit that it is happening, and that perhaps they are working on a fix? Long term Apple users (like most of us) would actually respect Apple more if they were to show that they cared.

This is a problem, Apple - you created it, you fix it!

Having said that, my earlier post on removing the com.apple.desktop.plist worked for a week, failed once, and has worked all week since. With different people noticing different effects it could be conflicts with different installed software. (But thats Lion conflicting with them, and not they other way around, because Leopard and Snow Leopard were OK)