I cannot change any user account icons. Under the Default icons it says "No Items". Any new users are set up with a tennis ball with no other options. In the initial set up, there were a lot of choices. Now they're gone. It there a missing file?
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion
No help here. Apple's online help didn't solve it either. Took it to the Genius Bar at our local Apple store. Stumped the Geniuses, too. Tried reloading the OS, that didn't work. Finally did a system clean install. Only then did this problem get resolved. It had something to do with transfering files from a Lion Time Machine back-up to a Mountain Lion equiped machine.
Yes the missing user icons is unexplained and nothing I've tried has resolved it.
It seems to have occurred as part of the 10.8.2 update for me.
No user shows any of the default or custom user icons available in the users system preference. All the Apple icons are present in the /Library/User Icons folder as well as custom icons but they do not appear within the system's panel period. No icons appear there. You are able to add icons to it -per user. Any done in this manner are saved in that user's preferences so this does not affect the system level. I have tried removing preferences. I have tried removing the icons and adding them back including as root but all changes are applied to the user only. I have run Diskwarrior, repaired permissions, etc. And nothing changes this.
I cloned the image to another laptop, deleted all preferences from main library, restarted, logged in expecting it to be a preference issue. Still no user pictures shown for default user. In case the original users were corrupt, I created a new user and logged in with it. It was given one of the OSX pictures randomly chosen by the system. I logged in as user and still no pictures are shown. Tried to do a reinstall of 10.8.2 combo update and system refuses saying I cannot be done. Booted from recovery partition and it allowed an internet recovery.
No change. Took a brand new laptop and used user migration to copy the users over to it with all settings. Broke that system as well. Repeated creating new users, etc and no change. This is really annoying. I can repeat migrating users only and then partial settings to try to narrow it down but its time consuming.
I have this problem too and it was not fixed by a system reinstall.
I have since learned that this is a result of Apple not wanting any manual modifications to the OS. If you manually change the default user icons folder in any way it breaks the folder and apparently nothing will fix it but a replacement of the original unmodified folder(s) done as root. You cannot then manually add icons into the folder EVER again and if you import users that result in a modification of that folder it will rebreak it.
You can only add custom icons in by the add icon user process NOT by manually modifying the folder. So for any image you will have to add them to the default user. Total PITA. How windows like is that?
But I haven't changed that folder. And there is no source for the original folder available to me. Hmm.
If you did upgrades from older versions of OSX, you may have changed it ages ago. Somewhere around 10.8.2 is where the problem appeared for me. I don't know if it existed in 10.8,10.8.1 or not.
You should be able to redownload the 10.8 installer from the app store. You may be able to extract the folder from the installer. You may have to install onto a secondary hardrive then retrieve that folder. You may be able to get to the recovery partition and get the folder off of it.
ah yes, but I didn't buy 10.8 - I have a new iMac with it pre-installed. I think the bug appeared after I restored the users to it from my old iMac.
Anyone ever find a fix, or workaround??
I just upgraded to ML from SL; and just booted in. Went to users and groups and discovered there are no Default Icons??
I can't find any other posts on this issue. Anyone got an idea of what can be done?
virtualruffy, you seemed to have done a lot of troubleshooting on this. Did you find a workaround?
Hello Oliver and anyone else with this issue.
I was able to resolve this thanks to another post (which took some creative searching).
Go to this post:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4813450?answerId=21270685022#21270685022
Thanks to Barney's post. It worked for me, might work for someone else. (note: I did have to log in with admin user account, but it fixed it for all users.)
I cannot change any user account icons
