Wrong icons on dock

The icon for Maps is not correct on my system for just one of the user accounts. Image of icon attached.


The correct Maps icon appears just fine in the "Get Info" window. I cannot paste the correct icon to the "Get Info" window. For some reason, it will not allow me to change the icon in "Get Info".
I'm stumped. I have searched these forums for an answer, to no avail. I have Googled for a couple days, but found nobody with the same problem.

Any ideas on how to fix this issue?

Woz said:

Any ideas on how to fix this issue?

Click to expand...

Try dragging the "bad" icons out of the dock…then drag "new" icons of these apps into the dock (presumably from each application in the Applications Folder). See if this fixes things.

- Nick

Looks like the old Appleworks icon.

Usually what Nick suggested works a treat. Just click and hold the icon on the dock and drag it into the middle of an empty desktop, go to the Applications folder and do the opposite, click and drag the icon to the dock and release.

Woz said:

I cannot paste the correct icon to the "Get Info" window. For some reason, it will not allow me to change the icon in "Get Info".

Click to expand...

"Locked" padlock icon in the lower right corner? If so, click it, enter your password to unlock.

I should add. What Harry mentioned above "rang a bell".

If the OP got a new computer recently (OP's profile lists a 2015 iMac)...or upgraded the OS recently. I think that if there was an apps icon in the dock which worked fine with an older computer or older OS version. If the hardware upgrade or OS upgrade made this app incompatible...I think that this can make the icon in the dock become "generic".

Just thought I would mention this if it happens to apply.

- Nick

Any time I have upgraded to a new version of a third party app i always replace the dock icon with a copy from the new version. With native apps in the case of a Operating System Upgrade this should happen automatically. If this problem only exists for one user it might be worth repairing permissions for that user via First Aid.

Thanks for all the assistance, folks!

I've dragged the icon off the dock and replaced it by dragging the app from the Applications folder many times, but the icon is still wrong. Making an alias to Maps and moving that Alias to the dock works fine, but that's just a band-aid. I want to find out what's causing the bleeding.
Here's some more info about this.
1. If I change the display mode in the applications folder from the large icon to list view or column view, the small icon is correct. When the app is displayed only as a large icon, it is wrong.
2. I unlocked the padlock icon using the admin password, but that did not allow me to paste a new icon in there.
3. This is on a newly created account. When this problem first surfaced, I tried killing the dock process, flushing icon caches, etc. Nothing worked, so I created a new user for the account.
4. On the three other accounts on the Mac, all the icons are correct.
5. Most importantly (probably should have been the first point) is that I just upgraded to Sierra.

I'm a PC geek from way back in the DOS 3.0 days, and can still hack Windows to solve most problems. A problem like this would probably be solved in Windows by a dive into the Registry. I'm a relative noob to OS X, and well...it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

Does the icon look correct in Launchpad? If so try dragging the icon to the dock from there.

Woz said:

The icon for Maps is not correct on my system for just one of the user accounts. Image of icon attached.
View attachment 25179

The correct Maps icon appears just fine in the "Get Info" window. I cannot paste the correct icon to the "Get Info" window. For some reason, it will not allow me to change the icon in "Get Info".
I'm stumped. I have searched these forums for an answer, to no avail. I have Googled for a couple days, but found nobody with the same problem.

Any ideas on how to fix this issue?

Click to expand...

@Woz:

I'm assuming you're either running El Capitan or Sierra. Apple has implemented a security feature starting with El Capitan called "System Integrity Protection" SIP for short. As long as SIP is activated, it won't allow you to change any Apple application icons. If for some reason the icon was incorrect before upgrading or installing El Capitan or somehow got messed up, you would now be stuck with that incorrect icon and not able to change it. If I'm correct in my assumption, you will have to temporarily turn off SIP in order to change the icon to the correct one for Maps. I know for a fact that icons are locked because I have several custom icons for folders that I could not change until I turned off SIP. Once the changes are made, SIP can be turned back on and the custom icons will stick. Not sure If that's what is happening with your system, but I suspect that may be why you can't get the normal icon for Maps back.

And I read that the latest version of OnyX for macOS Sierra now includes the facility to turn off/on SIP.

This would avoid the need to use Terminal commands which I know a lot of folks find intimidating.

Ian

Woz said:

I've dragged the icon off the dock and replaced it by dragging the app from the Applications folder many times, but the icon is still wrong.

Click to expand...

Have you tried running the free maintenance app called "Onyx"? Onyx does a lot of things...like deleting unecessary/old files, fixing permissions, cleaning up cache's, etc. Maybe this can help.

http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html

- Nick

Route 23529

I'm having exactly the same problem on 3rd Macbook in a row I think.

All there is in common – I always disabled SIP (csrutil disable in Safe Mode). As for what I read from above, I went and enabled SIP again, rebooted. When I logged in, I found out that some of the "bad icons" switched back to normal, some didn't. When I removed them from Dock and moved again, they displayed okay. Furthermore, when I went to Applications folder and looked through the app icons in Cover Flow, they all displayed normally.

It's gonna take a few days to confirm that this helped.

No

No, it didn't help at all, the bug still occurs. Can't believe Apple still didn't solve that issue, it started happening after El Capitan release...