That will open a recycle bin of some sort where you’ll find desktop icons and files that might have been accidentally deleted. Step 3: At the bottom-right corner of the iCloud Drive dashboard, tap Recently Deleted. Step 2: Select iCloud Drive on the iCloud homepage. Step 1: Sign in to iCloud on your preferred browser. To restore the icons, you’d have to restore them from iCloud Drive. If you have ‘Desktop and Documents Folders’ configured in your Mac’s iCloud Drive settings, desktop icons may go missing when deleted on or another device (Mac, iPhone, or iPad) that has access to your iCloud Drive account. On Mac, iCloud Drive provides the option to back up and sync files/icons present on the desktop. Step 4: Close Terminal and check if the missing icons have reappeared. defaults write CreateDesktop true killall Finder Step 3: Paste the code below into the Terminal console and hit Enter on your keyboard. Step 2: Double-click on Terminal to launch the app console. Step 1: From the desktop, click Go on the menu bar and select Utilities. What the command does is to unhide all desktop icons. As recommended by Apple, you can fix the Mac desktop icon not showing issue by running a specific command line in the Terminal app. This is another proven solution that we discovered during the course of research. Step 3: Close the Finder Preferences window and check if the missing icons have been restored to the desktop. Step 2: In the General section, check the Hard disks and Connected servers boxes.

Step 1: Tap Finder on the menu bar and select Preferences. This might help to restore icons that aren’t showing on the desktop. If your Mac desktop icons are still missing after relaunching Finder, proceed to modify Finder to include items from the hard disk and other connected servers on the desktop. Step 4: Click Relaunch on the warning prompt. Step 3: Now, select Finder from the list of apps and tap the Relaunch button. Quick Tip: You can swiftly launch the ‘Force Quit Application’ window within any app by pressing the Command + Option + Escape keys. That will immediately launch the ‘Force Quick Application’ window. Step 1: Tap the Apple logo on the menu bar. Consequently, this might also restore icons that weren’t showing on the desktop. However, you can instruct the OS to relaunch/refresh Finder, thereby fixing issues causing it to malfunction. Yes, the solution could be that simple.įinder is always running on Mac, so you can’t exactly close it. We found a couple of Mac users who were able to restore missing desktop icons by force-quitting Finder during research. When Finder malfunctions, you can as well expect other core system functionalities and apps to malfunction. Finder is an integral component of the Macintosh operating system.

Mac desktop folder icons