Lost Finder Sidebar icons after Upgrading to Mountain Lion

No, sidebar icons should be there, as uncolorful as they may be.

Sounds like Sidebar prefs are wonky...

Go to your Finder "Go" menu hold the option key and choose Library. Then go to Preferences folder and trash these files:

com.apple.finder.plist

com.apple.sidebarlists.plist

Then, restart, or log out and in again.

(You will have to reset a few finder prefs the way you like them.)

DId you upgrade from Lion? If so, were you using a 3rd-party app to put them on Lion, such as Colorful Sidebar or LionTweaks? Those don't work on Mountain Lion.

You'll need to uninstall it. The installlation instructions should show how.

Did you have "colorful sidebar" and SIMBL installed in Lion? That may have been causing this. At least that has been the culprit that modified my com.apple.sidebarlists.plist list so that I had only the names and not the icons in the sidebar.

I had this same issue and what worked for me was to delete the SIMBL folder (it's basically a plugin) from the main library's application support folder. This brought all the icons back---at least.

I really don't get why the color icons went black and white without providing you the option to turn on the color. It doesn't make sense for Apple to drain the color from eveything---VERY DISAPPOINTING.

Apple acts like a dictator, our icons of files are grayed and replaced by generic icons.

It's a shame!

Leave us the choice!

Don't bother complaining here -- Apple won't see it.

Do post here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Hopefully Panic's "Candy Bar" will be updated for ML and we can finally choose our own icons again.

I'm lurking and watching for people's experiences with ML before I upgrade, and this was one very persuasive reason NOT to upgrade yet.

I'm still reeling from the upgrade to Lion and its idiotic use of Kernel task.

I did find a nice little fix called sideeffects on MacUpdate that at least brings the color back to Finder. Now if I can only find something for iTunes and Aperture I'll be all set (until the next color drain.)

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/43078/sideeffects

I had this problem too. I had installed Colorful Sidebar and after my Mountain Lion installation, I had no icons at all. (Although when I looked at the individual folders, they still had the custom colored icons.)

To summarize, if you lost your icons from Colorful Sidebar:

1. Delete the SIMBL folder. You can go to Finder > Go > Go to folder... and type /Library/Application Support (pro tip: when you type to navigate to a folder like this, or in Terminal, you can type the first couple of letters and press TAB to autocomplete the folder or file name). You should see the SIMBL folder there and can delete it.
2. Find the plist files and delete them: Finder > Go > Go to folder... and type ~/Library/Preferences. Delete com.apple.finder.plist and com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
3. Restart Finder. (This worked for me; you may have to restart your computer. I also lost my custom sidebar preferences, i.e. the list of shortcuts I had there, so if it's tedious for you to recreate the list you may have to weigh the pros and cons.)

...And agree, I hate the lack of color too. It gives another dimension of visual variance to help select items from the list. (Plus, I have two "Documents" folders there — one my personal docs folder, the other is the Apache webserver Documents folder, and as there's no way to change the sidebar name without changing the underlying folder name, the only way I can tell them apart easily is with the icons.)

I had the same problem, but I found the following solution and now have my nice little color icons back in Finder:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/40989/colorfulsidebar

Click on the "more..." link for complete instructions.

Good luck!

hi guys

i didn't exactly loose my icons, they only lost their color & went back to their ugly grey selves as when i upgraded to Lion...

without wanting to hijack this thread this here worked like a charm for me - half a dozen clicks & BAM !!! color icons are back

have a look maybe it might help ? here :

http://macmatrix.blogspot.pt/p/sideeffects.html

i just CAN'T understand what the problem is to allow people to have colored or customized icons, have filed many feedbacks to Apple but no one ever bothered answering - it could even be there is a logical, sensible reason but not explaining it REALLY DOESN'T help

cheers

nuno1959 wrote:

. . .

have a look maybe it might help ? here :

http://macmatrix.blogspot.pt/p/sideeffects.html

That does work for many folks, but not all (including me, dagnabit).

Hi Pondini

it's been a long time... ;-)

i don't know EXACTLY why/how/what - i'm NOT versed enough in these matters BUT yesterday i had tried it & it also DIDN'T work for me !?

then before going to bed i uninstalled every last trace of Simbl & Colorfulsidebar, today i downloaded Sideeffects again, tried installing & here it is

good luck..

Yeah, I know, several folks have been using it for about a week, including some other beta testers. The very first version didn't work for almost everybody, but it's been updated a couple of times, and seems much better.

It just won't work for me; I've deleted everything, even did a clean install and migrated from my backups, still no worky.

Not really a big deal; I'm pretty used to it after testing ML for 5 months.