Finder not working after macOS upgrade

Check if Mac Is Running Out of Storage

Ideally, you may allow at least 15 to 20 percent of free space available on your Mac disk at all times (more is better). If not, it may affect the performance of your Mac computer.

1. Click the Apple icon on the menu bar, then select About this Mac.

   

2. Click the Storage tab to see the storage overview.If your Mac doesn’t have enough storage, you may utilize the Manage button to help you sort and organize your files to save space for your disk.

   

   We recommend that you clean your Mac as much as you can to free up more disk space, as this helps to improve the overall performance of your Mac.

Check if Spotlight is indexing

Spotlight needs to index all new files for you to search. This likely happens after upgrading to a newer macOS or when you just transferred files from an external drive to your Mac. Indexing usually takes time to complete and can consume a lot of your Mac’s resources that can affect its overall performance.

To check if Spotlight is indexing, open Spotlight Search or click the magnifying glass icon on the top right corner, type any file name, and see if there is an “indexing…” status message showing up.

You can stop Spotlight from indexing if you want to ignore certain folders:

1. Click the Apple icon on the menu bar and select System Preferences.

   

2. On System Preferences, click Spotlight.

   

3. Click the Privacy tab. Add folders you want Spotlight to ignore.

   

Reset Finder Preferences

There are some instances that the Finder misbehaves because its preferences file is corrupted. We can safely delete it and restart the mac. After reboot, your Mac will regenerate the Finder preference file itself.

Deleting the Finder preference file will cause Finder preferences to return to its default. If you made changes to your Finder Preferences, you would need to re-enable these changes you made after the reboot. We also recommend creating a backup of your Mac with Time Machine if necessary before modifying any components of your Mac.

1. In Spotlight search, type ~/Library/Preferences/ and double-click the Preferences folder on the results of top hit.

   

2. Find and move to trash the file
   com.apple.finder.plist”
   .

   

3. Close the Preferences folder, and then restart your Mac.

1. Open the Terminal App. You may use Spotlight search to open it.

   

2. Type the following command exactly as written rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist, and then press RETURN.

   

   Take note that this command will completely remove the file so be careful in typing the file name make sure that you will not accidentally enter a different file name.

3. Restart your Mac for the change to take effect.

If you are not comfortable using the command above, alternatively, you may use this command to transfer the preference file to your desktop instead. This is much safer for general users who are not familiar with using terminal commands.

1. Type the following command as written mv ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist ~/Desktop, and then press RETURN.

   

2. Restart your Mac for the changes to take effect.
3. After the restart, you can now move to trash the
   com.apple.finder.plist
   file on the desktop.

   If the Finder issue is still the same, try to delete or move the sidebar preference file.

   The file name is

   com.apple.sidebarlists.plist”
   in the same user Library Preferences folder.

   Here is the path:

   ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
   .