Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Icon view, some showing thumb, some not

I have folders where I'm setting to icon view, handful of .dng files. fine art images.
5 of them show an image thumbnail. 5 show a text icon. Any idea why the inconsistency?

dng? some graphics format I presume? some of them may be corrupt or an internal format that cannot be rendered by finder. try opening them in preview and see if they all open or not.

Should be fine. This is "digital negative" from CS5 (Adobe).

Ever tried to relaunch Finder, or restart, or invoke DW? Could be a finder.plist issue.

Mac, how relaunch finder? What is DW?

While awaiting "Mac's" answer... google will give you over 700,000 links with the solution in under 2 seconds. Just a thought.


My guess: DiskWarrior.

Thanks, Hal!
DW is indeed Disk Warrior, used to rebuild directory. I have a hunch that just running Disk Utility may not do the trick.
To relaunch Finder, press command(Apple)-Option-Escape, in the dialog box click on Finder, then click on "relaunch" at the bottom of the window. It helped me when icons on the desktop became unresponsive or were not rendered right (generic icons instead of application-specific).

Finder can also be relaunched by clicking and holding on the Finder Dock icon while pressing the Option key, then selecting Relaunch from the contextual menu.

Did not work for me. Do you mean "right click" (or control-option-click)? That thing works.

No, it's definitely Option-click for me; right-clicking or Control-clicking yields the same contextual menu as plain clicking. Are you sure you were clicking and holding the mouse button with the Option key already drepressed? If so, perhaps this is an OS thing. I'm running 10.5.8.

Edit: Control-Option clicking does the same thing, without the delay. Nice to know!

Sorry, your way works too (I was pressing Option and clicking at the same time!). And it takes a couple of seconds for the menu to appear.
Option first, then right click also works, understandably.

thanks DK, the finder I did the finder relaunch, but it did not solve the issue. oh well..

DK, you are a moderator here a long time. One of my favorite people on this forum. Always have incisive ideas and solutions. thanks.
You ever notice that Hal, hardly ever provides much useful information, but spends most of his energy criticizing/analyzing the thread themselves?


Please do not make any more ad hominem remarks; they will be deleted.

I might have an idea about the icon view. If you click on a file, then command-I (get info), what is written under open with? Is there any difference between the "image icon" files and "text icon" files? If yes, choose an "image" file, get info on it, see which app opens it, then go to get info of a "text" file, choose the same app and then click "apply to all". Maybe you get all icons in order.

Mac, that sounded promising! But both had Adobe Photoshop CS5 for the open with.

I all but give up. The last suggestion: open a "text" file in CS5 and "save" or "save as". It may now be shown as an image icon. Another thought: when I save files in Photoshop, I then see them as image icons. Sometimes, when they get transferred from another computer, especially from a PC to a Mac, or e-mailed, they may lose the image, although still openable with Photoshop. Could be just a CS5 glitch or transfer glitch.
If they all open well, I would not be worried...

What!!!???

When Hal was recently missing for a while, other folks were worried. There's a reason. Like other knowledgeable contributors, he has helped many folks - including me and my daughters - out of some very tricky technical jams over the years.

To use the vernacular of the young: "Get Real."

ryck

You know, if some image isn't showing a preview/thumbnail... there's a pretty good chance that one wasn't saved into the file. But i guess the constant stream of intriguing mysteries keeps the juices flowing around here. (at times it's unclear whether "MBP" represents MacBook Pro or Munchausen By Proxy).

I second the "What!!!??"

There are some extremely knowledgeable people here, but I've learned more from Hal than from everyone else put together, and that's saying a lot because, like I said, there are many other knowledgeable people here. Pay very close attention when he speaks.

His contribution to this thread, and apparently what you're objecting to, was to remind you that you can find out stuff on your own without waiting to have the information spoon-fed to you. His advice would fall under the "Teach a person to fish..." philosophy. If you want to learn, you should listen.


As for relaunching Finder...

Relaunching Finder is for emergencies, like when Finder stops responding. It should not be used for something as trivial as hoping to refresh some icons. Doing so may in fact have the opposite effect of the one intended.

Finder uses the invisible .DS_Store file in each folder to record information about the folder and the items it contains: window size, position, view, icon positions, Spotlight comments, and even thumbnails. For efficiency, it caches this information in RAM (because it's constantly changing and Finder doesn't want to be banging the disk), and only occasionally updates the actual .DS_Store file. It does always update the file when it quits, as happens when you log out.

But when you relaunch Finder, it isn't given a chance to quit. Relaunch yanks the rug out from under it, killing it dead even if it was in the middle of doing something. If this happens at the wrong time, whatever Finder was doing can be left half-done. One way to corrupt a file is to leave it partially updated, and if you happen to kill Finder when it's in the middle of updating a .DS_Store file that file can be left corrupted. Odd icon behavior, in particular, is a common symptom of a corrupted .DS_Store file.

I'm not saying that "Relaunch Finder" alway, or even usually, corrupts .DS_Store files, but it can, and force-quitting Finder or any other application is both rude and potentially harmful. Only do it when the program is already being rude to you by not listening.

When I want to quit and restart Finder, I usually do it from the command line, using the Terminal command:

osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'

If you don't want to do it from the command line, you can instead use AppleScript Editor to create the one-line script:

tell application "Finder" to quit

Save that as ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Finder/"Quit Finder.scpt", creating missing folders as needed.

While you're in AppleScript Editor, open its Preferences and enable "Show Script menu in menu bar". That adds a menulet to the right side of your menubar, with an icon that looks kinda like a paper scroll. When you're in Finder, that menu will now have a "Quit Finder" item.

Using "Quit Finder" (unlike "Relaunch Finder") politely asks Finder to quit, giving it a chance to clean up after itself. In particular, all the information it has been holding in RAM gets cleanly written to all the affected .DS_Store files.

After you Quit Finder, you can launch it again at your leisure by clicking on its Dock icon. (When I quit Finder from Terminal, it's usually as part of a script that eventually has a matching osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to launch'.)

To see the difference it makes, move a Finder window and maybe change its view. Use the "Relaunch Finder" command, and notice that your changes are lost. The window reappears in its original location and using its original view.

Do the same thing using "Quit Finder" instead, and notice that your changes are preserved.

Now extrapolate to icons. Indiscriminate use of "Relaunch Finder" (or the Terminal equivalent killall Finder) can leave stale icon information in the .DS_Store file.

You can force Finder to rebuild a corrupted .DS_Store file by deleting it. (Google will tell you how.) Finder will rebuild it the next time it's called upon to display the contents of that folder. It'll for sure get the icon thumbnails right if it does, but be cautioned that this also is not a procedure that you should consider normal. There's a lot of other information in the .DS_Store files (like Spotlight comments, for example) that you'll be throwing out when you do this.

Nice explanation, thanks. It is good to know. It occurred to me to do it regularly because the Finder on my old G5 became partially unresponsive at times (like no way to change a filename on the desktop). At all times, the normal behavior was restored upon relaunch (same as with log out - log in).

Is Relaunch really just a GUI front end to killall Finder, though? At an earlier point in time, you thought so, but experimentation suggested otherwise.

Ok, guys, I just opened those non thumbmail ones in PS, adjusted a bit. Trying to shake a thumbnail into the finder icon. no luck.

Strange... What if you save such a file in s different file format, not dng? And, out of curiosity, why dng? My PS5 does not even have this option.

dng is a raw format, you need the software to get it to dng

That could be the problem. I hear that raw formats may not be handled 100% accurate. I assume that saving in a different format, a CS5 native, could restore image icons.
BTW, if only dng files have this unusual behavior, my guess about raw could be right.

I think I see this in other circumstances too.