My MacBook Pro keeps saying The folder “Desktop” can’t be opened because you don’t have permission to see its contents.

Choose Home from the Finder's Go menu, click on the Desktop item, choose Get Info from the File menu, and give yourself read and write access in the Sharing & Permissions section.

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I had this problem after I upgraded to Yosemite. I found a solution which I haven't seen mentioned here. I'll describe it in case there are others with the same problem.

For reasons lost in antiquity (no I can't remember!) I was set up as two users, which I shall call NAME (the older one) and NICKNAME (the current one).

If I click on Desktop or Downloads in the Finder Sidebar I got the error message described by the OP. However, if I click on the HOME icon, which has the NICKNAME, I was able to use both folders within the HOME folder, and see all the items within them.

I looked at the permissions (GET INFO) on the two folders that the error message referred to and found that these both had Read+Write permission for NAME but not NICKNAME. I added permission for NICKNAME but found that the folder contents were not what I expected - they were, in fact, the contents for NAME from way back. In other words, these were not the same 'Desktop' & 'Downloads' folders that I was seeing from the HOME folder.

So I removed both NAME folders from the sidebar, and then from HOME dragged the folders of the same names to the sidebar. These are the folders for NICKNAME which is the current user. I can now see the contents of the correct two folders.

I hope this is of use to others facing this problem!

I tried doing this multiple times and it still says i don't have permission to use desktop pictures documents downloads, etc. I also can't take screenshots because I don't have permission. I also have another problem where I try to login into my iCloud account. I am putting in the right password but it says there was an error during authentication. Any way to solve this problem? Thanks