macOS high sierra Finder not responding

I had this issue after upgrading to High Sierra on my September 2017 Macbook. After being unable to find a solution on forums etc I contacted Apple Support. They directed me to start in safe mode; which helped for a few days. After it occured again I contacted Apple again. They said there must have been an error during download and installation nof High Sierra. They recommended best solution would be to re-download and reinstall High Sierra. I didn't do it. After a while I decided to disable all "finder integration" for Dropbox etc. After that, Finder works fine. No lags, no lock-ups, no force-quits needed. I recommend that you disable all finder integrations for cloud storage solutions.

*** UPDATE ***

My issues have been resolved.

For me the fix was to:

1) shutdown.

2) unplug ALL External USB/Firewire drives

3) Reboot and verify finder was good.

4) Verified my new drive was added to Filevault (I had recently upgraded to an SSD and I wanted to make sure the encryption process wasn't part of the slow finder issue), and that encryption was good.

5) Plugged my External Firewire drive (used for Time Machine) back in.

6) so far all is good.

I haven't had any issues with the finder locking up since. I don't have any issues with iCloud and it doesn't seem like that had any affect but who knows. I did not log out of icloud as some had suggested as the previous steps fixed my problem.

So hopefully that helps some of you.

I had exactly the same problem with my MBP 2015. After trying several options I ended up in signing out in iCloud. That did the trick! My mac is responsive again.

I will have to find a solution for my iCloud though...

It was because of the external drive. I booted up the computer without the external drive and it works fine.

I had this problem - Finder not responding after install of High Sierra. I powered down an external USB

3 hard drive and the problem went away.

Waiting two days did nothing. Signing out of iCloud freed finder from its spinning color wheel prison right away. I didn't even have to restart! Thanks.

The machine is MOST definitely re-indexing drives. I had no issues for several days. Got to work this morning and connected to an external drive that I use often (2 TB). That was it, Finder didn't work right after that. I tried many solutions, but nothing worked. I disconnected that external drive, and immediately Finder began working correctly. I will connect the big external drive overnight for reindexing.

So I rebooted (had to hard boot.) I then reconnected my ext. HDD and so far Finder is running fine.

I am waiting on the time machine backup.

So key here is. Fresh boot with NO external drives. Then reconnect external drive after full boot up.

We'll see what happens from here.

I THINK I HAVE FOUND A SOLUTION.🙂

I have experienced this finder crashing problem after re-installed high sierra onto hight sierra.

I remove all the password from my account and logout from iCloud. After doing these, restart your computer.

Everything works fine for me after that.

Hope this will help.

The only way I've found to fix this problem is, I'm afraid, a reformat followed by a clean reinstall of High Sierra followed by manually restoring apps and documents, etc.

On the upside of this, it gives the opportunity to remove a lot of dross that accumulates on the HDD.

Judging by the number of people reporting these problems it is very disappointing that Apple appear not to have fully tested the upgrade process before releasing it!

Just a supplemental update to my previous:-

using terminal I broke down the directories which formerly contained several thousand files in the offending drives to contain less than 600 or so files, each in a smaller sub-directory.

This seems to have worked so far...

Hi There,
I literally allowed the Finder program to stay on my screen for >24 hours over the weekend with external power connected, yet it was still not responding.
Taking cue from others in the same forum, i terminated the link to iCloud Drive and Photos in the 'iCloud' icon in 'System Preference', immediately the Finder sprang into action again. :-) . Try it, and let me know the result.
Good luck and enjoy!

I have found my cause of the problem lies with paragon. After removing everything from command prompt. The finder works again.