After the Sonoma upgrade, I cannot change an external drive's (ie. Sandisk USB stick) folder icon. I have been using the technique of copying a picture, selecting the folder's info, and then pasting the copied picture onto the upper left hand icon, which then displays the copied picture. This technique now does not work, and I am unable to change the folder icon on the external drive.
MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 14.1
sorry, I cannot replicate your issue. I just now tried changing the icon of a thumb drive. it changed successfully, and I had no issues changing it back to my original custom icon I was using. and, yes, I'm using Sonoma.
what I can suggest would be to Start up your Mac in safe mode and see if that then allows you to change the icon on the thumb drive.
please see Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support.
but also please note that formatting will erase ALL data from the thumb drive. if you have data on the drive you want to reformat, please move ALL of that data to another storage device before proceeding with the reformat of that drive.
Most of my thumb drives are SanDisk and I am unable to change any folder icon on those drives. I have a few other brand thumb drives, and I don't have the same problem with them; just SanDisk. I tried starting up in Safe Mode, no help. So, unless Mac or SanDisk comes up with an update to their software, I'm unable to change a folder icon on there.
did you reformat those drives to MacOS drives, just just use them "as-is" ?
Sandisk ships things as Windows New Technology File System )NTFS) and unless you are REAE the DEVICE then they are not Mac-native drives, they create a Mac volume inside a NTFS file.
I think that Grant Bennet-Alder has hit the nail on the head. when I first tested your issue, I tested it on Mac formatted drives. changing folder icons was not an issue. but after seeing the new replies to this discussion this morning, I tested this issue again using windows formatted thumb drives. I cannot change folder icons on either of the two.
sagpilot wrote:
I’ve never ever had to reformat the Sandisk thumb drives after previous Mac OS upgrades, so I doubt that is the problem.
sorry, but, just because something works one way on one macOS, there is no guarantee it will continue to work the same way on subsequent macOS versions.
sagpilot wrote:
I’ve never ever had to reformat the Sandisk thumb drives after previous Mac OS upgrades
you should reformat a drive before using it. you will not need to reformat it after each macOS update / upgrade.
I never have had to do that either, but my entire collection of Sandisk drives still are unable to change the folder icons on them. I just now tried to format a brand new Sandisk USB drive and still no luck in changing a folder's icon from the generic icon display to a selected photo. Oh well...
sagpilot wrote:
I just now tried to format a brand new Sandisk USB drive and still no luck in changing a folder's icon from the generic icon display to a selected photo. Oh well...
did you format it with either HFS+ or APFS? one of my Mac formatted thumb drives is a Sandisk, and there is no problem with changing folder icons on it.
this is what an "'ordinary" Rotating Magnetic drive from MacOS 10.12 looks like.
The Terminal command
diskutil list
produces the output:
/dev/disk4 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *80.0 GB disk4
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk4s1
2: Apple_HFS X12-Drv80 79.1 GB disk4s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk4s3
3: main Volume is Apple_HFS Hierarchical File System or HFS+
straight from the Box, I would expect to see NTFS for the main Volume.
I’ve never ever had to reformat the Sandisk thumb drives after previous Mac OS upgrades, so I doubt that is the problem.
Ok. So how do I format/reformat a Sandisk thumb drive?
Unable to change external drive folder icons