My sidebar no longer contains a heart icon for Favorites (from my Home Library) or the special icon for Users. Those folders are now plain, regular folders -- but the other sidebar icons appear as they should. This is the case for my Macs running Lion and Mountain Lion.
Is this normal? My Mac running OS X 10.6 still shows a heart for Favorites.
iMac
Yes, unfortuanetly it is. With the Mountain Lion update Apple made some big under-the-hood changes to Finder and Dock, which makes it really hard to alter them and customise them, and in that process, custom icons are no longer shown in the sidebar 😟
To be clear, mine weren't custom icons -- they automatically showed that way (a heart icon for Favorites, for example). All I did was drag the folder into the sidebar and it showed up with a special icon.
Do other Lion or Mountain Lion users have the Favorites or Users folders in their sidebar, and if so, what do their icons look like?
Try deleting the com.apple.finder.plist.
You need to look in your user Library/Preferences for the .plist. Either hold down the option key while using the Finder “Go To Folder” commandand select your user Library in your home folder or use the Finder “Go To Folder” command and enter ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Force quit Finder (command - option/Alt - Esc) and test. If it works okay, delete the plist(s) from the desktop.
If the same, return the .plist(s) to where you got them from, overwriting the newer ones.
If you prefer to make your user library permanently visible, use the Terminal command found below.
You might want to bookmark the command. I had to use it again after I installed 10.8.4. I have also been informed that if you drag the user library to Finder it will remain visible.
Thank you. You're obviously running Mountain Lion. Do you have the Favorites folder in your sidebar, and if so, does it have the heart icon? I just want to make sure it can work before deleting the .plist.
If you've never had the icons, you can ignore deleting the .plist.
When I drag the Favorites folder to the sidebar, it is just a normal folder. Screen shot of what my sidebar looks like.
Have you tried doing a Get Info (command - I) on the folder, unlocking the window and copy and paste a desired icon to replace the generic one? I think (can't remember) I did that to get the cat by my user folder. You can get free icons off the Internet. If you can screen share with the 10.6 computer you can try to copy it there and then paste in 10.8 or maybe you could copy the icon in 10.6 and email it to yourself.
Thank you very much.
Do you have a screen shot of the Favorites folder (the one from your user library) in the sidebar? If yours looked like a plain folder too, then I'd know my situation was normal. I don't see the Favorites folder in your screen shot above.
I did have the icons before, but then with system upgrades, maybe some folders don't look as they did. I know Sites is a plain folder now, where it didn't used to be.
I think Apple disallowed custom icons with 10.8, but maybe not, because you still have your cat!
I took the Favorites folder out of the sidebar before I did the screen shot, but it was just a regular folder.
It appears what you are seeing is normal, but you can add custom icons as I describe in my last post.
I'm now working in my Snow Leopard partition and get the heart as you described. But when I do a Get Info, it appears as a regular folder, so you can't copy it from Snow Leopard.
In Snow Leopard, it was all there. Colour icons, a customisable Dock etc. But with the Mountain Lion update, that's no longer possible. Favorites and Users etc only look like normal folders in the Sidebar with 10.8 sadly 😟
XENiCraft wrote:
In Snow Leopard, it was all there. Colour icons,
Gray apparently, is the new Black.
haha yes indeed it does seem to be so...
I posted before but it was removed coz it was "speculative"....
Thank you! I wish they hadn't gotten rid of those icons, but I'm glad there's nothing wrong with my system, and now I won't mess with it trying to fix something that isn't broken!
No problem, glad to be of some assitance 🙂
Yeah I really liked my custom and coloured icons in 10.6! oh well. not much we can do about it.
just a note of warning, if you google coloured sidebar icons in mountain lion, there are many applications that claim that they fix it, but they are known to mess with os x and have broken people's installs to the point they have to reinstall, so i would seriously advise against using those.
However,that being said, applications like XtraFinder and Path Finder are Finder alternatives, which can allow you to customise your Finder safely. I have not had any issues with these applications so far. Just to let you know I am in no way involved in the products/companies, im just a happy user 😝. XtraFinder is free (here is a screenshot of XtraFinder), though less featured, it suits me much better than Path Finder, which is $40, but works as a completely separate application and allows much much more customisation.
I hope that helps.
xeni
sidebar: no Favorites heart icon or special Users icon
