icons display bug since Affinity 2.5.6

[Thomahawk]

right after the update to 2.5.6 (mac) all the icons of my afdesigner files disappeared. They are just empty white squares now, like every other file not affiliated to a certain application.

Surprising once again to see how important those icons are. I have such difficulty now to identify the files I need to open.

[Thomahawk]

This is really soo annoying.

Anybody else having this problem?

[Thomahawk]

Just installed the 2.5.7 update

STILL THE SAME.

All affinity file icons are gone. Just blank icons.
Restart does not solve the problem.

No one else having that problem?

[Thomahawk]

After trying around with restart finder, delete preference files, terminal commands fro cache delete etc etc. nothing worked.

Then I came across Finder - view - show view options, "show icon preview" when I click this OFF the icons appear.

Problem is, now I have the Affinity icons, but I have no preview icons like for movies or affinityPhoto, where I use preview of the document content instead of the standard icon.

So there is definitely a BUG in Affinity since 2.5.6 that manages the icons the wrong way!

[Thomahawk]

This is incredibly annoying.

I can have a good, quick overview over image files and videos content with preview on, or I can see which are the affinity files with preview off, but can not have both anymore, like I had before Affinity 2.5.6

 

 

 

[NotMyFault]

Assuming MacOs 15.1.1

1. In Finder, open system settings.
2. go to "General", "Login Items and Extensions"
3. scroll down to "Quick Look"
4. All the Affinity apps are listed with 2 Entries. "QuickLookShareExtension", "ThumbnailShareExtension"
5. Ensure that exactly one of the apps has the Extensions activated. I have chosen "Affinity Photo 2".

 

[Thomahawk]

Hi, thanks for the input.

I never even knew about this options, and honestly I shouldn't have to. Affinity like any other app did work correctly in regards of their file icons until the 2.5.6 update.

However. I am on Mac OS 14.7, I found it and did set it like you said, or any other configuration, it does not matter. I have either other apps preview icons but Affinity with blank icons or I set folder view to no preview, then I have correct Affinity icons but no preview from anything.

[NotMyFault]

After choosing the desired app for thumbnails, you may need to clear the icon cache once. As you said earlier that you have done those steps already, follow those tutorials once again.

I doubt that Affinity does anything wrong here, the web is full of thumbnail related issues (for many apps, unrelated to Affinity).

20 hours ago, Thomahawk said:

I never even knew about this options, and honestly I shouldn't have to

It is MacOs which offers and enforces those settings. Affinity can’t set them on its own for security reasons. During app installation/ first run you will see a popup where you can allow access by Affinity.

MacOs changed the OS behavior several times in the past. Affinity is more complex as all 3 apps (and betas and V1 / V2) support all file formats. Users may purchase only one or all 3 apps, install retail or beta, or V1. So unfortunately all Affinity apps try to register for thumbnail creation, and as a user you must choose.

Full disclosure: I’m no Affinity fanboy, I have hundreds of post about Affinity bugs, missing functionality etc. But in some cases Apple, Microsoft, or GPU vendors are causing issues and Affinity can’t solve them from their side. 

[sansnom]

Hi @Thomahawk, I'm also on macOS Sonoma 14.7.2 and I installed the suite in its latest version, v2.5.7. No problem with icons.

Regarding these corrupted icons, you can take a look at this forum to clean up the Icon Cache:

https://osxdaily.com/2022/05/23/clear-icon-cache-mac/#comments

Alternatively, as there seems to be some corruption somewhere or some mechanism that is not working properly within the Finder, you can also delete its preferences file... unfortunately also losing some settings that you may have made previously:

Macintosh –> Users –>  Library –> Applications Support –>  Preferences –> com.apple.finder.plist

[Thomahawk]

On 12/25/2024 at 5:45 PM, NotMyFault said:

I doubt that Affinity does anything wrong here, the web is full of thumbnail related issues

Hi, thanks for the input.
But not in my experience. I am using Mac OS since it exists and I do not ever had this case not even once with any other app. And as a former Macworld editor I installed tested moved and removed thousands of applications. Hence the conclusion, this is very clearly an Affinity problem.

[NotMyFault]

1 hour ago, Thomahawk said:

Hi, thanks for the input.
But not in my experience. I am using Mac OS since it exists and I do not ever had this case not even once with any other app. And as a former Macworld editor I installed tested moved and removed thousands of applications. Hence the conclusion, this is very clearly an Affinity problem.

Affinity is special that all 3 apps offer to open all file formats, including e.g. Publisher can open RAW Images. Your conclusion might be premature. I don’t rule out that Affinity may cause the issue, or at least triggers the issue. But you mentioned earlier that you used all the tricks to reset icon cache etc, probably aware that there are genuine Apple issues with icon creation and thumbnail storage.
 

BTW: I had one of the first Mac, actually the Mac emulation on Atari ST, and a regular Mac in the office I worked as student.

[fde101]

38 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Affinity is special that all 3 apps offer to open all file formats, including e.g. Publisher can open RAW Images.

This is not special.  Consider how many apps can open plain text files.

Additionally, while the native Affinity format may have a common organization and encoding within the data stream, it still uses different extensions for each app, and each is identified as a distinct format by the underlying operating system, which is what would matter in this case.

 

All being said, this thread is effectively a bug report, and accordingly should have been posted in a different section of the forum, so that it can get more attention from those who would be involved in actually investigating and fixing bugs.  Perhaps a moderator will move it there.

[NotMyFault]

13 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Consider how many apps can open plain text files.

Which mostly don’t show content as thumbnails 

[fde101]

3 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

Which mostly don’t show content as thumbnails 

Fair point, so consider how many apps can open JPEG files.  I have lots of them installed on my Mac and have never seen this issue with them.

 

@Thomahawk, to help narrow this down a bit further, is your QuickLook working (spacebar with one of the icons selected in the finder), or is that also blank?

Is this happening with old files that you have not touched since before the update, or only with files that are newly saved since the update when you started to observe the issue?

[Thomahawk]

On 1/3/2025 at 10:36 AM, fde101 said:

All being said, this thread is effectively a bug report, and accordingly should have been posted in a different section of the forum, so that it can get more attention from those who would be involved in actually investigating and fixing bugs.  Perhaps a moderator will move it there.

That is what I did first, long before posting it here. But it seems nobody is looking at bug reports.

[Thomahawk]

Ups I just found out that I did confuse Feedback with Reports and did in fact not yet post it there. So I did just now.

Because again I hoped to solve it when I did the Mac OS update to 14.7.2 today, but still nothing.

[Thomahawk]

On 12/25/2024 at 5:45 PM, NotMyFault said:

I doubt that Affinity does anything wrong here, the web is full of thumbnail related issues (for many apps, unrelated to Affinity).

I just remembered another indicator that points to Affinity, because the icons worked all well exactly until after my update to Affinity 2.5.6 - instantly after that, all Affinity icons disappeared.