Posting this so that if anyone is searching for this bug they find an answer:
I recently swapped in a larger SSD, performed a fresh OS installation, and migrated my data over. On the new drive in the Finder Sidebar, all external volumes I plug in to my laptop show the folder icon rather than the external volume icon (figure 1). Curiously, that is not the case when Chrome opens the file explorer with a system dialog (figure 2). I booted from my old ssd and plugged in the same USB; it showed up as an external volume in the Finder sidebar (Figure 3). Lastly, I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS in an attempt to fix this visual bug. It didn't work. External volumes still look as they do in Figure 1.
Besides the OS reinstall, I also tried these mitigations:
1. An Apple thread said to delete com.apple.sidebarlists.plist from ~/Library/Preferences. That did not help.
2. A reddit thread discussing a different sidebar issue suggested "delete the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file in /Users/Your User Name Here/Library/Preferences and then /Users/Your User Name Here/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist clear it out off you trash and then reboot it will remove all sidebar items and set it to default". That did not help.
3. In this MacRumors post , someone comments that their external volume Finder sidebar icons turned into folder icons on Monterey. The culprit was a Finder Extension related to BetterZip. The only solution was to disable BetterZip. I do not have BetterZip. I do have Keka, and when I disabled its finder extension and relaunched the Finder with TinkerTool, the issue was gone.
Lastly, I updated Keka to version 1.2.61. This fixed the problem
I saw this bug on Mojave but it has also been seen in Monterey (see post linked in point 3).
I recently swapped in a larger SSD, performed a fresh OS installation, and migrated my data over. On the new drive in the Finder Sidebar, all external volumes I plug in to my laptop show the folder icon rather than the external volume icon (figure 1). Curiously, that is not the case when Chrome opens the file explorer with a system dialog (figure 2). I booted from my old ssd and plugged in the same USB; it showed up as an external volume in the Finder sidebar (Figure 3). Lastly, I used recovery mode to reinstall the OS in an attempt to fix this visual bug. It didn't work. External volumes still look as they do in Figure 1.
Besides the OS reinstall, I also tried these mitigations:
1. An Apple thread said to delete com.apple.sidebarlists.plist from ~/Library/Preferences. That did not help.
2. A reddit thread discussing a different sidebar issue suggested "delete the com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file in /Users/Your User Name Here/Library/Preferences and then /Users/Your User Name Here/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist clear it out off you trash and then reboot it will remove all sidebar items and set it to default". That did not help.
3. In this MacRumors post , someone comments that their external volume Finder sidebar icons turned into folder icons on Monterey. The culprit was a Finder Extension related to BetterZip. The only solution was to disable BetterZip. I do not have BetterZip. I do have Keka, and when I disabled its finder extension and relaunched the Finder with TinkerTool, the issue was gone.
Lastly, I updated Keka to version 1.2.61. This fixed the problem
I saw this bug on Mojave but it has also been seen in Monterey (see post linked in point 3).
