Photoshop CS6 icons sometimes do not appear on Macintosh

[clinton_dyches]

Yes, this is a question.

I've been using my trial of Photoshop CS6 Extended for 10 days now. I have run into a peculiar problem - when saving a file Photoshop does not display any sort of icon. No thumbnail, no generic, nothing. It's not a huge problem, I can always open the image but not by double-clicking on the icon: it's just not there.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem and if there is a resolution to it - or is it just a bug? I didn't have this problem with the beta version and I've repaired all permissions on my hard drive to see if that was the problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Clinton

[captain1944]

@uncleotto    I fully agree with your assessment

[Noel Carboni]

I have come to wonder whether Adobe has a mantra they force on their people that says something along the lines of "if we manage to trigger a bug in some OS API or driver we HAVE to make them fix it, rather than try to work around it."

I fully understand that when a product has millions of users someone somewhere will have pretty much every problem one can imagine, but this thread's onto 170 posts over a period of 5 months, and not every user reporting the problem is as dumb as a post.  There might be a hint of a systemic problem here.

-Noel

[Guest]

Chris,  Why ONLY Photoshop 6 then?  5.5 not problem, 5 no problem, 4 no problem, whatever OS version no problem.  ONLY 6.

Re: "(oh, and a few posts back someone mentions similar icon/thumbnail failings for other applications)" on occasions, rare occasions this might happen, but it's typically something that requires a finder relaunch or similar.  This is nothing like that.

[Was DYP]

46tyie22nn wrote:

Chris,  Why ONLY Photoshop 6 then?  5.5 not problem, 5 no problem, 4 no problem, whatever OS version no problem.  ONLY 6.

Re: "(oh, and a few posts back someone mentions similar icon/thumbnail failings for other applications)" on occasions, rare occasions this might happen, but it's typically something that requires a finder relaunch or similar.  This is nothing like that.

I may have been to one that mentioned that but that was only in the context of, once this is triggered by PSCS6 then the fuzzy low res looking icons appear to be generated by PSCS5. But once this is cleared by a reboot or as someone else mentioned by logging out and back in, the icons created by PSCS5 are no longer fuzzy.

I have never see PSCS5 trigger this icon problem. It only seems to be triggered by PSCS6, once triggered by PSCS6 all kind of other icon problems seem to appear, but again I know of no other app that will trigger this.

[Was DYP]

Another thing I see that I have not seen mentioned is that the icon on the top bar of the image window sometimes does not appear even though the icon shows up in the finder.

Also the more PSCS6 is used the more likely it will trigger this behavior. If I only save a dozen images or so in a days time I never see this. But if I go through hundreds of photos at a time after a photo shoot, make miner changes, sharpening etc., after about 30 to 50 saves this icon problem will be triggered. I can clear it but 30 or so saves later it will reappear.

[conroy]

Was DYP wrote:

Another thing I see that I have not seen mentioned is that the icon on the top bar of the image window sometimes does not appear even though the icon shows up in the finder.

Do you mean a generic JPEG/PNG/PSD/etcetera icon sometimes shows instead of a representation of a file's content despite Finder displaying a content-representative icon?

Or do you mean that absolutely no icon appears in a floating window title bar?

If the former, that will be normal and correct if the file genuinely has no custom icon but Finder is able to use a Quick Look-generated preview as an icon.

[Was DYP]

conroy wrote:

Was DYP wrote:

Another thing I see that I have not seen mentioned is that the icon on the top bar of the image window sometimes does not appear even though the icon shows up in the finder.

Do you mean a generic JPEG/PNG/PSD/etcetera icon sometimes shows instead of a representation of a file's content despite Finder displaying a representative icon?

Or do you mean that absolutely no icon appears in a floating window title bar?

If the former, that will be normal and correct if the file genuinely has no custom icon but Finder is able to use a Quick Look-generated preview as an icon.

I mean absolutely no icon appears in a floating window title bar, but no the Finder is not showing the Quick Look-generated preview as an icon because there is not a white border around the icon. Of course when the finder is not showing an icon the floating window title bar doesn't show one either.

[marcPhotoNYC]

Chris,

are you suggesting I delete the .DS_Store so I can restore my thumbnails. If so how would I do that. Where is .DS_Store and are there different .DS_Store's that I shouldn't touch.

I'm on a Mac version 10.7.4 on a 2 x 2.8 GHzQuad-Core Intel with occasional icons showing up after awhile.

Marc

[jeffseaver]

Chris Cox had it right - clearing out the appearance settings solved the PS6 thumbnail icon issue for me.

Every folder on a Mac for which one has established a specific appearance (View>Show View Options, or Cmd-J) creates an invisible .DS_Store file within that folder, aka directory. It's not much fun to try, one at a time, to a) make them visible, and then b) trash them -  as there can end up being thousands.

There are several utilities that can batch remove these files - I used Onyx for Mac. I think File Buddy may also do this, Snow Leopard (or Lion) Cache Cleaner may have this capability - suprisingly, Mac Pilot didnt seem able to). There is also a Terminal command to perform this on an individual folder (directory), but I didn't know how to batch run it to clear out every directory on my hard drive, so I used my utilities to do so. Once Onyx was done removing all the .DS_Store files on my hard drive, I restarted and voila - Photoshop CS6 now saves every file with thumbnails that can expand from 16x16 to 128x128 (and on up, depending on your OS).

It does require that you re-set appearances on certain folders (icon view for folders of images, date-sorted lists for versioned documents, column view for for fast scanning of nested hierarchies, etc.

[marcPhotoNYC]

Thank you Jeff!

[marcPhotoNYC]

I couldn't find an option in Onyx to delete .DS_Store files. Would you know where it is. Here is a screenshot of the program.

Thank you in advance.

Marc

[jeffseaver]

Sorry, it's not that obvious....

I'm running 10.6.8 and Onyx is OS-version-specific so there "could" be small variations if, for instance, you're in Lion.

Launch Onyx

Go to Maintenance heading

Click Rebuild tab

Third radio box down is √ Display of folders' content

Use the Select button at right and choose your hard drive (which is, effectively, / on the path)

Enable the "This folder and all its sub-folders" radio button

If you don't want to mess with all the other rebuilding options, DE-select:

LaunchServices

dyld's shared cache

Spotlight Index

Mail Envelope Index

Sidebar of Finder windows

Help Viewer menu

Click on Execute button lower right

Requires a restart to see results, but open PSCS6 and re-save or create a new image file to the desktop - let me know if it works for you too.

[marcPhotoNYC]

Thank you again Jeff.

Marc

[clinton_dyches]

It works - but does this make it an Apple or Adobe issue? And will it continue to work or, as the .DS_Store grows, will we have to do it again?

At any rate, I'm glad to have icons back - in full preview mode as they should be.

Thanks,

Clinton

[Guest]

As Mac OS X is responsible for writing the .DS_Store file, this would be an Apple issue.

DS_Store is not growing. It is just corrupting. DS_Store tells the system whether it should display icons and at what size. There is no indication that this file actually contains image data or anything that would grow.

Deleting/refreshing DS_Store only treats a symptom. The problem is with some OS X process corrupting these DS_Store files. So it is probable that the issue will happen again.

[clinton_dyches]

I didn't really mean to say "growing"!

But I know what to do, now, if I start losing icons again and am thankful for all who chimed in here and help 'fix' my problem... we'll just have to wait and see if it's a temporary fix, I suppose.

Thanks,

Clinton

[marcPhotoNYC]

After running OnyX as suggested all my icons in Photoshop open command are very tiny? Any suggestions on how to get them larger?

[clinton_dyches]

I haven't tried deleting .DS_Store - I'll read a little further and take this question to the Apple Support Forums and see if others are having similar problems.

I'm glad to learn that I'm not the only fish out of water.

Clinton

[marcPhotoNYC]

I used the program DS_Store Cleaner and I am seeing the icons for the files in the finder but within Photoshop when I select open the icons are missing. See screenshot. This either means the program I used didn't do the trick or it's PhotoShop or it OSX Lion. Either way I wonder if I should now use the program I was originally suggested to use, OnyX

[jeffseaver]

Hi Marc -

This looks like a screenshot from the mini-Bridge, on Lion? Sorry, I can't answer for Lion because I haven't tested this on our Lion machines - but the Onyx solution did, as I reported, solve the problem for me in Snow Leopard - but there's no reason DS Store Cleaner shouldn't have done every bit as good a job. Deleting these files is a simple script, it ain't rocket science.

As helpful as Chris C.'s input has been, I am suspicious about ladling all the blame on the Mac OS, for two reasons - one, no other app I have (and I have hundreds) is having this problem, two, I can replicate the problem on several machines with PSCS6, and the second second reason, hopefully without causing offense because as I said Chris C. was helpful and for me, nailed the problem - Adobe does have a tendency to, whenever in doubt, blame Apple (I was a tester with Adobe for the first few CS versions and heard this time and again) until shown otherwise. While the solution may be to dump these appearance files, I'm a bit skeptical as it does not explain why they would all-of-a-sudden become "corrupted"  at the moment we upgrade to PSCS6.

[marcPhotoNYC]

The screenshot is from the OS open dialog within Photoshop within Lion and not mini-bridge. Thank you Jeff for replying and your help. I think I will run OnyX as well and see if that improves my situation.

[Chris Cox · Accepted solution]

The thumbnails in the open dialog are provided by the OS (as is most of the open/save dialog).  So there is still a problem with the OS creating or displaying thumbnails.

It's not a matter of blaming Apple without reason, just that Apple has an awful lot of bugs in the OS that don't get fixed very quickly.

Here we know that the OS is responsible for the thumbnails, that clearing the OS cache of thumbnail and metadata fixes it for some people, and that even after that the OS can't always draw the thumbnails when it is supposed to.  I have no idea why that would be worse in some applications than others - but the OS is clearly failing to draw thumbnails, and that's not something that Photoshop has any control over.

[uncleotto]

Chris Cox - "I have no idea why that would be worse in some applications than others - but the OS is clearly failing to draw thumbnails, and that's not something that Photoshop has any control over."

Chris, I appreciate that you are trying to help here, but this is clearly not a matter of it being worse with some applications than others, as you say. I've carefully read hundreds of posts on this issue, in this forum and others, and in every case the only application with which this problem arises is Photoshop CS6. Whether or not the Mac OS is responsible for creating thumbnails, the problem only arises for users of this version of this application. That tells me that Adobe has changed something with this version of Photoshop which is triggering whatever that problem is within the OS. Older versions of Photoshop cannot reproduce the problem, and neither do any other applications. I don't think the relationship between the problem and PS CS6 can possibly be any clearer. Apple's problem or no, Adobe is getting the black eye here, and can, with enough effort, figure out what they wrote differently in CS6 that exposes the OS's problem.

[Chris Cox]

We do not know exactly how Apple generates their thumbnails, or why they might be sensitive to certain application versions.  We do not have Apple's source code, and do not know the details of all of their bugs.

We do know that thumbnail generation works most of the time for most users (meaning that the application is writing all the correct information), but fails sometimes in the OS for other users.  We do not know exactly why the OS code is failing, or why it fails for some users and not others, and some times but not others.  To me that would indicate some sort of timeing issue or uninitialized variables in the thumbnail code.

Until Apple determines why their code fails and tells us the details, we can't know what we might have changed to trigger that failure.  (and to our knowledge, we changed nothing that could explain this, and even re-examination of our code and files yielded no clues).

We should not have to reverse engineer the OS and all it's thumbnailing code to figure out an OS bug.  This is an Apple OS bug that Apple needs to figure out.

Just because an application exposes a bug in the OS, does not mean that the application is responsible for the bug in the OS, or can do much about the bug in the OS.   This isn't even something we can work around - it's not a direct API call, but something that happens outside the app after a file is written to disk.

If you would like to see this fixed sooner, please let Apple know that you care about this issue and would like them to address it sooner.

[clinton_dyches]

Chris,

Since I initiated this discussion, I should note that I've had no more problems since the .DS_Store 'resolution' while others seem to be having the same problem. It has now migrated to the Apple discussion board and I will, when I'm able, post to the Apple Developer's board (if you haven't).

Clinton