Sidebar selected items not showing up in window

Ever since I upgraded to iTunes 11.3 yesterday (coincidence?), nothing shows up in my window's sidebar except my main computer. What's going on? I look at my Finder Preferences>Sidebar and see all the items checked, but nothing in the window's sidebar. I thought restarting this morning would help, but nope. Anybody have any ideas?

Which sidebar? You've mixed in two different applications (iTunes and Finder). Updating iTunes does NOT affect Finder. If it's the iTunes sidebar, checking Finder preferences won't make any difference, you'd need to check iTunes under the View menu on the top bar.

sidebar not showing properly

Obviously I could have been clearer, but you jumped right over "...nothing shows up in my window's sidebar except my main computer...Finder Preferences>Sidebar and see all the items checked, but nothing in the window's sidebar."

You would not see your main computer in the iTunes window.

So, this has to to do with all my Finder windows. Nothing is there in the Sidebar except my computer under Devices. This has only happened since I installed the iTunes upgrade yesterday. Coincidence?

Restarting today didn't solve the problem, and it's a royal pain having to dig down layer after layer to get to anything. Don't want to put aliases on the Desktop for all my daily-accessed folders, but that's the only temp solution I can think of until Apple fixes this mess (assuming iTunes is the culprit).

Again, if anyone has an idea on how to reverse this mess and let me see what I'm supposed to in my Finder Sidebars, I would appreciate it.

Yes, you could have been more clear. The first sentence was about iTunes, which leads to the conclusion that the "windows sidebar" was in iTunes and that "my main computer" was perhaps referring to only internally stored music, etc, and no that stored on external devices.

Ah, well, back to cases: It's probably NOT the iTunes update, as I have the latest version of iTunes installed on July 11th, and my Finder is working just fine. So what, exactly, is missing from the sidebar? Do you have other hard disks, external disks, connected servers, for it to show? And are you saying that the Application, Desktop, documents and Downloads folders, plus your Home folder, even if checked, are not showing up? What version of OSX, what Mac are you running?

I THINK, and it's only THINK, an approach to fixing it will be to go to /Users/Library/Preferences and find the file com.apple.finder.plist. Copy it to somewhere safe as a backup (Desktop?) and then delete the original. A new one will be created when you restart Finder. Reboot. That reboot restarts Finder and it will recreate the .plist file. If you customized the sidebar in Finder, you'll need to redo the customization.

MacInWin said:

I THINK, and it's only THINK, an approach to fixing it will be to go to /Users/Library/Preferences and find the file com.apple.finder.plist. Copy it to somewhere safe as a backup (Desktop?) and then delete the original. A new one will be created when you restart Finder. Reboot. That reboot restarts Finder and it will recreate the .plist file. If you customized the sidebar in Finder, you'll need to redo the customization.

Click to expand...

Errrr... not this time as far as I know - if they're using OS X Mavericks.

I was just reading about such changes that Mavericks now uses with its cfprefsd daemon.

If I understood correctly, the latest OS X no longer builds a new .plist when the old one has been removed, but grabs one from some cache folder or some such thing.

Just saying...

EDIT:

And besides that a quick Google search on 'items missing from finder sidebar' seems to have been a common problem.

And Trashing the prefs didn't seem to always help for a solution, even when the user put the items they wanted back, etc:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/23771512
https://discussions.apple.com/message/21276300

But just in case, double check the settings in the Finder Sidebar prefs and maybe some got unselected somehow, maybe...

http://ansonalex.com/general/mac-os-x-finder-sidebar-icons-missing-display-video/

Well, the discussions you pointed to said to dump the plist and restart, which is what I had suggested, so I'm confused about why you said "not this time."

But that's why there are horse races!

Yes they did and just as you suggested but they didn't always work and why I added the remark - if they're using OS X Mavericks.

It seems that Mavericks has changed the way the .plist is replaced with its cfprefsd daemon and the old method no longer works as it used to.

But maybe I should have said maybe as I don't know what OS X version the OP is using.

Try:

Open Finder Preferences - Sidebar tab - uncheck everything - Close the window

Hold the option key down and right click the Finder icon in the Dock - select Relaunch Finder

Open Preferences - Sidebar tab - check mark what you want - Close the window

Relaunch Finder again

This is going back to MacInWin's comment from yesterday, 9:09 PM

Sorry I didn't respond last night, but my laptop didn't have the forum's password.

Finder>Preferences>Sidebar>Favorites I have everything checked except All My files. Under Shared, nothing and under Devices I have 3 of 4 checked, as well as Recent Tags under Tags. This is where being able to attach a screenshot would really be helpful.

I updated to the new iTunes on my laptop last night and that didn't affect my laptop, so that possibility was just a coincidence on my iMac problem.

I'm running 10.9.4 and no new apps have been installed.

I will try the other suggestions (except .plist since that seems from other comments not to have an effect in Mavericks) to see if the Sidebar listings show properly.

Okay, I'm about to make all of us feel a bit stupid; I know I do. You've heard the saying "Sometimes the simplest solution is the best"? Well...

After going through ALL suggestions here AND online again with a search, nobody mentioned this obvious solution either. Don't know why all the items disappeared, but here's the solution.

One suggestion online was to drag whatever folders, files, whatever you wanted to see from within your hard drive hierarchy onto the Sidebar. That I knew. After depositing one or two, my cursor happened to move over the word Favorites at the top of the Sidebar. Lo and behold a word popped up to the right saying Show. I clicked that and all my favorites appeared again. When showing, do the same and the word changes to Hide. Suppose at some time I knew that, but obviously we all tend to forget the simple things to check—like, is your computer plugged in?

Anybody know in what version of MacOS this choice was hidden?

So, thanks to all who offered suggestions. I appreciate the help.

I think the techs may call this a classic case of PEBKAC.

But I must admit that I often wonder who the demented Apple GUI developer is that insists on Cheshire Cat like appearing/disappearing things and the text in grey on grey, just to suit and blend in with all the grey graveyard looking folders.

It reminds me of a misty graveyard Sherlock Holmes mystery... not a good OS GUI. I wonder if they ever read the book on Mac GUI Guidelines???

Wow! Glad you got it sorted out. To be honest, I never noticed the "Hide/Show" options when hovering over Favorites, or Devices or Shared. Learn something every day. One would think they would have put that in preferences also.

Color me embarrassed. I've read about this before and didn't put two and two together.

vjspin3 said:

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... ....
One suggestion online was to drag whatever folders, files, whatever you wanted to see from within your hard drive hierarchy onto the Sidebar. That I knew. After depositing one or two, my cursor happened to move over the word Favorites at the top of the Sidebar. Lo and behold a word popped up to the right saying Show. I clicked that and all my favorites appeared again. When showing, do the same and the word changes to Hide. Suppose at some time I knew that, but obviously we all tend to forget the simple things to check—like, is your computer plugged in?

Anybody know in what version of MacOS this choice was hidden?

So, thanks to all who offered suggestions. I appreciate the help.

Click to expand...

It seems that this "hidden feature" began with Mountain Lion as far as I could find:
How To Add To, Hide And Reorder Those Pesky Sidebar Items [OS X Tips] | Cult of Mac

But there sure isn't much mention of the feature but another later one here:
http://dailymactips.com/2012/11/09/using-the-sidebar-in-mac-os-x/

It seems pretty flukey that you just managed to have your mouse pointer in the right or wrong place and click at the same time and not notice the change.

That's about the "dumbest" option I've seen yet; almost as dumb as when they removed the colors from the sidebar icons and changed them all to dull gray. Sometimes Apple tries to be too "cute" in their design.

This is specifically to pm-r regarding his comment on not noticing the disappearance of the items as I supposedly clicked on the Hide option.

That got me thinking. In order for all three areas to not show the normal items I have checked to show, I would have had to hide each of the three areas individually, something I know I didn't do.

That means we have a solution to a problem but still don't know what caused the problem.

Anyway, just some final reflections.

Again, thanks to all.

Thanks for posting the clarification and I was wondering if I had just misread or misunderstood your description.

But you're right, to click on all categories and click the Cheshire Cat "hide" button and not notice would be way too far a stretch!!!

One thing in Mavericks that I hadn't really noticed previously, basically SL, was that the sidebar's vertical divider line can be clicked an moved to the Window's side so that the sidebar no longer shows.

Maybe there's some buried shortcut that does that when invoked. But I sure can't find it, like a lot of Mavericks changes.

Is there any possibility that someone else had access to your machine that could have made the changes? As pm-r and you have agreed, it would be a huge stretch to "accidentally" select that Hide function three times and not notice. That only leaves the highly unlikely event of the .plist spontaneously changing those three settings or that some other agent (person) made the change.

No, there's just me and my wife—she has her computer and I have mine.