How to get icons to display correctly in Finder?

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, it didn't help. I started up in Safe Mode, but the icons are still blank; I restarted as usual, they're still blank. There are nine .webloc files on the Desktop, some old, some recent; one of them shows the correct icon, the other eight don't. I have a folder with some 200 .webloc files in it; it shows about the same 10% with correct icons, the rest blank.

Thanks again. I trashed the com.apple.finder.plist; a new one immediately appeared. There was no com.apple.desktop.plist file. After restarting, situation unchanged.

Another fillip: Yesterday I cloned my fresh Yosemite set up from the MacBook Pro's internal SSD to an external drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner. When I look at that backup drive from the MBP running from its own internal drive, the .webloc icons are blank. When I start the MBP from that external backup drive, icons are correct both on it and the internal drive.

This has been an occasional problem, actually, since I first upgraded to Mac OS X 10.2 over a decade ago: easily fixed in the Classic Mac OS, but I've never found anything to do about it in OS X. Except just live with it. So far, only .webloc files seem to be affected; all other icons are displaying correctly.

So then I tried replacing the com.apple.finder.plist file on the internal drive (which doesn't display the icons correctly) with the same file from the backup drive (which does display the icons correctly when I start up from it). After restarting from the internal drive with the replaced com.apple.finder.plist, still no correction. Anybody else have any ideas?

Thanks for the suggestion; I hadn't thought of this. I created another account, moved the offending icons to where they could be seen from that account, then logged out and logged into the second account. The icons displayed correctly. I moved them back to the Desktop in my primary account, logged out and into that account, and deleted the second account. The icons are again blank. So the problem is localized to my account, not System wide. I suppose it must have to do with some corrupted Preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences, but I don't know which. Doesn't seem to be com.apple.finder.plist, anyway – though it's a Finder problem. I'll have to dig into it all tomorrow.

I was hoping there'd be a simple solution, like rebuilding the desktop file. I did that plenty of times in the old days, and it always worked.

Thanks again. I tried deleting ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.finder, but it made no difference. (I believe this was already done when I ran the Maintenance utility.)

I tried dragging a couple of the blank icon .webloc files to Chrome, then to Firefox; they opened the web page addresses as expected. Then I dragged the URLS out of those browsers to the desktop as I usually do to make .webloc files; they appeared with the correct icons. Then I tried dragging another URL out of Safari to the desktop; once again it made a .webloc file with a blank icon. So it appears the problem is somewhere in Safari? Naturally, there's no way to reinstall Safari without redoing the whole System install (which I did only some ten days ago). Part of the reason I upgraded from 10.9 to 10.10 was because Safari had become unusable in the earlier System, and I figured so long as I had to do a complete reinstall, I might as well do the upgrade as well. Safari was seeming to work fine, for the first week anyway. *Sigh*

I tried deleting ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari, but that made no difference either.

I looked inside the Safari package and found the .webloc icon (/Applications/Safari/Contents/Resources/webloc.icns), which looks fine (opened it in Preview). I tried replacing it with the same file from Safari on the backup clone (which doesn't have the icon problem). No fix. I tried replacing the entire Safari application file with the one from the backup. No fix. So either the problem is somewhere in some WebKit stuff that gets installed somewhere when Safari is installed; or it's back to the System as a whole. If the first, again there is no way to reinstall Safari without doing the whole System; there is no downloadable installer for Safari. (And I found when struggling with Safari in 10.9 that even Safari updates didn't fix its problems.)

Or maybe there is a way to reinstall Safari? I downloaded the 10.10.2 Combo Update and ran it, then ran the Maintenance utility, but it made no difference. So: I have 10.10.1 installed on another computer; I ran the 10.10.2 Combo Update on that, and copied the Safari from there onto my MacBook Pro, ran Maintenance again, and restarted. No change.

So, to recapitulate: For some reason, in the last couple days most of the .webloc files on my computer (I have hundreds) are showing with a blank icon, rather than the proper icon with a Safari badge in the middle. About 10% of them display correctly, some of them recent, some very old. The .webloc files work fine when double-clicked or dragged to a browser, they just don't display correctly in the Finder. When I drag a URL from Safari's address bar to the Desktop to make a .webloc file it shows a blank icon; when I do the same (with the same URLs) from other browsers the icons are correct. No other icon types have this problem, only .webloc files created from Safari (in the last couple days) AND over 90% of the hundreds of .webloc files I've created in the past from Safari and other browsers.

I've tried all the suggestions kindly offered here, plus several more ideas of my own, with no effect.

I'm stumped. Wish I could just rebuild the desktop file, like in a "modern" OS.

Icons are missing in some 95% of .webloc files everywhere, so far as I can tell. In a folder with 131 .webloc files, dated

(Sorry; posted above in error.)

Icons are missing in some 90% of .webloc files everywhere in the Finder, so far as I can tell. In a folder with 131 .webloc files, dated 2011–2014, 19 (dated 2011–2012) have the correct icon, the rest are blank. In another folder with 24 .webloc files, 1 (dated last month) has the correct icon, the rest are blank. In another with 200 .webloc files, 34 have the correct icon, the rest are blank.

When I do a Spotlight search for Name: ".webloc", it finds 1,603, dated from 2003 thru 2015; it looks like about 95% show blank icons. Find Any File finds 14,173 with .webloc in the name, going back to 2002; again, about 95% seem to have blank icons. Why does Spotlight find only 11% of them? When I search for one not in the Spotlight list by name, Spotlight finds it – and it does have the .webloc extension, which is how Find Any File found it. When I search with Spotlight for Kind: Web internet location [note: internet not capitalized, according to Spotlight], it finds 14,358, 185 more than Find Any File – and 9x times as many as it found when searching for .webloc in the name, though all do have .webloc in the name. EasyFind finds 14,176 with .webloc in the name. About 15% percent of those, however, are identified in the "Kind" column as "ilht" (some of these I know were recently made with Firefox and Chrome, while most are very old, probably made with Camino before Safari existed) – though they do have the .webloc extension. (Find Any File has a Kind column, but all the files are identified there as "web internet location".) And in EasyFind, all the Kind: webloc files show the correct icon, while the Kind: ilht files have blank icons – but many of the latter have the correct icon in Find Any File and Spotlight. All very heartening. At least I know not to fully trust any search. Fun, huh?

When I get around to it, my next experiment will be to update my CCC clone backup, check to make sure it doesn't show this icon problem, then clone it back to the internal drive – since it appears the problem is located in some file that CCC doesn't back up. Maybe not today, though.

(Now I'm told: "Your content could not be saved due to an error. You may have been logged out." So far as I can tell, I'm still logged in. I'll log out and back in again, then try again.)

Thanks again; I tried it; no change. I think the Maintenance utility does this anyway.

Meanwhile, I decided to go for the nuclear option: Since my clone backup was completely up to date, I cloned it back to the internal drive. Problem fixed. Still don't know what caused it, or an easier way to fix it, but at least it's not annoying me anymore.

Meanwhile, a response on another forum says: "How to fix incorrect icons being displayed in the Finder varies by which version of OS X you're using. In Yosemite, Onyx can delete the Icon Services cache (click the Cleaning icon, then the User tab, check Icon Services, click Execute)." Unfortunately, I didn't see this before I did the complete restore, so I've no way to try it now. Apparently the Icon Services cache is one of the files that cloning utilities such as CCC don't copy (and not one of the caches that Maintenance's basic set of functions cleans).

A search for "icon services cache os x" finds Clearing the Icon Services Cache in Yosemite, which leads to more information. I expect this is what the OnyX function does, for folks who're not big fans of Terminal.

Sure would have been simpler just to rebuild the desktop file.