Macbook prod desktop chaos - hundreds of icons

[yolatechno]

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a job with a colleague's Macbook. He had quite a few icons on his desktop, and they were disorganised. I went to "view" - "sort by name"; just to try and at least get them to look neat. It's possible I might have pressed "Clean up" instead.

Whatever I pressed, the entire desktop filled up with icons. Like, there are hundreds of icons now there!

Can anyone help with this problem?

Thanks.

 

[Donnation]

I don't think clicking "Clean Up" would have that effect on the desktop, as choosing that only aligns the icons.

Is it possible that he had all of these icons already on the desktop but that since they were not aligned you couldn't see all of them?

 

[maflynn]

Can anyone help with this problem?

Why not use your own account and so you don't have to deal with his desktop?

I wouldn't want anyone messing my icons on my desktop, though I don't have a lot there.

 

[wordsworth]

A while ago I updated my friend's 2012 MacBook Pro to El Capitan from Mountain Lion I think it was.

His desktop was littered with icons reflecting his business activities, and personal stuff to a lesser extent: invoices, quotations, letters etc. With his agreement I began to sort and organise these before doing the update, creating a folder for invoices, another for quotations, etc.

After I'd tidied up much of his desktop it became clear that there was a veritable single 'pile' of icons which had seemingly accumulated in the one location, presumably because the rest of the desktop was 'full'. It had not been obvious that there were multiple files in this one location until I began to 'sift' through them. There must have been forty or fifty of these and placing them in one location was presumably some sort of default behaviour by the OS.

Perhaps something similar had occurred with your colleague's computer – and had some bearing on your own 'clean up' instruction?

In fact, reading this thread again, Donnation's post alludes to this possibility also.

I would suggest that a sensible approach might be to adopt a similar manual (though slow) method of 'cleaning up' as my own, making sure that newly created folders, even if only temporary, can house the numerous but presumably varying types of files on his desktop. You'd have to go through them with your colleague to make sure no additional confusion is caused.

I am not aware of an automated way of dealing with this but someone else reading this may be better informed than me.

 

[chown33]

I just wanted to say that you can always view your Desktop in a window. That makes it possible to see everything in a List or Column view, without affecting the layout on the desktop.

You get the window by going to the Home folder (Finder's Go menu), and then double-clicking the folder named "Desktop".

Or just use the Desktop menu item in the Finder's Go menu.

 

[yolatechno]

Thank you for the advice everyone! He doesn't think that he had so many things on his desktop - we joked that it looked like every file he'd ever opened had suddenly ended up there.! But it would make sense that there might have been a pile he wasn't aware of, as Wordsworth suggested.

I thought that it might be a bug or something.