OS X asks Where is FinderSyncAPIExtension on startup

I believe that extension is for Google drive. Do you have Drive installed on your computer and in your systemui bar?

And it can be found here:

/Applications/Google Drive.app/Contents/PlugIns/FinderSyncAPIExtension.appex/Contents/MacOS/FinderSy ncAPIExtension

How do you select that file?

You don't. I just provided the path so that people could see for themselves that it is a Google Drive extension. For me, just relaunching Google Drive corrected the problem. I have an Automator script to do that since Google Drive loses its connection virtually every day and many times it happens multiple times/day. I just run my restart script to quit and start GD again. Doing this has gotten rid of the error described above the two or three times I've seen it.

Right-click on the Google drive application in the system wide Applications folder, then select show package contents. Then navigate to Contents/PlugIns/FinderSyncAPIExtension.appex

Do that the next time OS X asks you for the location, it should work if I am remembering what I did correctly.

i get this message every time i log into good drive recently (it seems to coincide with swapping to a corporate account). Navigating to the package contents doesn't seem to do anything.

Has anybody figured out the cause of this?

thanks a lot!

I had the same problem and I checked the contents of the /Applications/Google Drive.app/Contents/PlugIns/FinderSyncAPIExtension.appex just to make sure it was still there.

I think I created this problem because I deleted the com.apple.finder.plist file suggested for fixing something else. That file is in ~/Library/Preferences/ and it seems that it holds information about Google Drive which could make sense that when deleted I started getting this problem. Since you switched accounts the com.apple.finder.plist probably still holds the old info about google drive.

Once I quit and restarted the Google Drive application everything got fixed for me.

So I would suggest to quit the Google Drive application, delete the com.apple.finder.plist (or move it to the desktop temporarily just in case it creates another issue) and then restart the Google Drive application.

I hope this works for you

mmm.. i don't seem to have that file for some reason :-/ but... I'm not being bugged by that message either recently - not sure why, perhaps somethings just rectified itself

scrap that - its still popping up on my mac at home 😟 however, I can't even find the preferences folder within library let along that file. Any ideas where it may be?

thanks

So the preferences folder is hidden and you will not see it in the Finder. The way to find it is to select the menu "Go to Folder..." from the "Go" menu of Finder. There just type ~/Library/Preferences. Then you should be able to look for the com.apple.finder.plist file

Just a word of caution, if you respond to the dialogue box that is asking where the API extension is by navigating through to 'Applications/GoogleDrive' do NOT double click the Google Drive application, it screws finder terminally

When it asks you to find the extension, just point it to the Google Drive App in Applications. It seems to have worked for me (for now).

just to re-state - this absolutely screwed up my finder. The symptoms were that after doing this it looked fine, but after a reboot the finder went into permanent and continuous crash and restart loop (was only obvious by looking at the Force Quit dialogue box and seeing the Finder application flash in and out continually). That was happening on every user on the system.

I followed the usual 'trash Finder preferences etc' fix, tricky to do without a working Finder (had to be done by booting Mac in single user mode - and thats not pleasant on a 5k iMac screen - talk about small point size!). That however in my case failed to resolve the issue - I gave up at that point and decided just to restore from the latest Time Machine backup (life is too short).

In my tale of woe - that failed to restore correctly (unable to write to the internal Fusion drive when booting from the recovery partition.. this was with the latest patched OS El Cap with the recovery mode changes just introduced) but it failed only after trashing the partition table on the Fusion drive (symptom you see the Fusion drive in Disk Utils but it is not a destination drive for anything in Time Machine restore and Disk Utils just shows the raw drive entry, not the partitioned or formatted drive)... end result a totally dead un-bootable Mac with no recovery possible using standard point and click tools in recovery or Internet recovery boot.

Fix was ultimately to boot the Mac in local recovery mode, fire up terminal, remove the raid bonding on the Fusion partition table (found a useful article on the support forums that talks about Fusion drive partition table manipulation), switch to disk utils, let it fix the partition table, flick to restore from Time Machine... couple of hours later Mac was back up and working.

Not saying that all this was due to pointing at Google Drive, but trashing the Finder certainly was down to that, and from there it gets really hard to try and fix things...

This typically occurs when you have google drive installed and more than one google drive identity. The conflict occurs when drive cant determine which files to synch when you are logged into more than one account.

I just installed Drive on a new Apple computer and saw that dialog for the first time. I do have Drive syncing with multiple accounts, so this may be one of the triggers.