Tip: OSX Open File Dialog misfire
How to correct OSX's Finder Failure
[UPDATE: there is no update. This is still an issue in Yosemite]
I've had an ongoing hate affair with OSX's Finder app, which is so inferior to Windows Explorer as to make me want to switch back on a daily basis. It's terrible, and one of the bugs that has been annoying me most recently is the Case of the Missing Screenshot.
I take screenshots all the time - our Trello cards are littered with them, and cmd+shift+4 is about the only three-finger shortcut on a Mac I can remember. (On an unrelated note I recently discovered four-finger shortcuts - WTF - that isn't a shortcut, it's a form of Yoga.)
The problem has come when I take a screenshot, click on the add attachment button in Trello (that's where I see the problem most often, albeit not the only place) only to find that the screenshot isn't showing up in the Finder Open File dialog as expected. If I use Spotlight I can find it, if I open Finder and browse to the folder I can find it, but when opening it from within an app I can't. What gives?
There are lots of threads on lots of forums (fora?) about this, most of them recommend either killing com.apple.Finder.plist
, or downloading RefreshFindr. Neither of these help.
The first solution I found is the nuclear option, with a suitably militarty sounding explanation (Resetting the NVRAM). - and involves one of those four-finger shortcuts - cmd+alt+p+r. To quote from the answer:
I got the problem temporarily fixed by resetting NVRAM (PRAM):
- restart your Mac
- during startup press alt-cmd-p-r until you hear a second chimeThe alt-cmd-p-r key combination is know as "zapping the NVRAM / PRAM". The PRAM is a programmable chip that holds various bits of information about your computer's hardware along with other items. It's role is similar to a BIOS chip in a typical PC.
Honestly, that isn't really a solution - and you'd have to be really desperate (I was) to do it.
[UPDATE]
So it looks like the problem is related to the way in which applications get / hold the creation dates of files. Hard to believe, but apparently if you have an app open, it won't recognise files created in the future - so if you open Chrome and leave it open overnight, anything created on / after the second day won't appear in the Open File dialog. Solution is to restart Chrome. Every day.
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