OS X: Some Icons Suddenly Disappeared in Finder

Suddenly some icons, not all, disappeared in my Finder on my MacBook.  A restart and clearing the caches could not solve this problem. Fortunately a reinstallation of OS X was not necessary because the solution was so simple…

An hour ago I ran into a very strange (and scaring) situation. Suddenly some icons disappeared silently from Finder’s windows on my MacBook (see figure 1). The labels were still there but above them a blank, white, empty space grinned at me. The labels and the empty areas were still clickable to open the corresponding file or folder.

Figure 1: Lost icons in Finder on OS X.

Figure 1: Lost icons in Finder on OS X.

OK, I thought, restart your system. → Done. — Unfortunately still the same problem. A bit of agitation rose in my mind.

“Stay calm! Clear the cache!” I cleared the cache folder /Library/Caches and ~/Library /Caches. After that I restarted the system again but still the same problem. Agitation started to struggle with my countenance. Was it necessary to reinstall OS X on my MacBook in the end? Scaring thought… How many time would it cost? — Maybe my Time Machine backup could bring my MacBook back to a sane state?

STOP! Let’s first see what the safe mode shows. So I booted my system in to safe mode.

What a surprise. In safe mode the icons were exactly there were they should have been. Some hope began to fly through my soul.

After an additional reboot into normal mode the icons appeared there as well.

What a simple solution for a problem with an unknown reason.

This entry was posted in Mac, Operating systems, OS X and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to OS X: Some Icons Suddenly Disappeared in Finder

  1. Tony Francis says:

    I know this article is a few months old, but I just ran into this problem today. I did what you suggested and it worked for me as well! Thank you.

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