MacOS – Viewing preview of files in finder

This solved it for me! http://macadmins.psu.edu/news/2011/06/grayed_out_finder_folder

So, what happened? It appears that the folder's creation date was set to a random date in 1943. While we are unsure of how it happened, we did figure out how to fix it.

We used a few binaries that came with the Developer Tools, GetFileInfo and SetFile. GetFileInfo showed us the creation date of the folder. We overlooked it at first, but with closer examination it caught our eye.

$ GetFileInfo Test/ directory: "/Users/user/Desktop/Test" attributes: avbstclinmedz created: 06/13/1943 06:13:00 modified: 06/13/2011 15:07:33

We then could change the creation date using the SetFile tool.

$ SetFile -d 06/13/2011 Test/

After seting the date back to a reasonable time, we can see that it has truly changed.

$ GetFileInfo Test/ directory: "/Users/userid/Desktop/Test" attributes: avbstclinmedz created: 06/13/2011 06:13:00 modified: 06/13/2011 15:07:33

The folder then showed properly in the Finder and was again usable. We also found that if you created an alias of the folder, you could see the data and move it out. Once it was moved out into another folder, the old folder could be deleted.

Two things you can try :

If you don't need the preview feature in column mode (or for a short term fix), you can disable the preview column by going to View Options cmd-J in Finder and unchecking the "Show preview column" checkbox.

Alternatively, you can disable Quartz 2D Extreme (which should be disabled by default, but may be active and been known to cause Finder and preview slowdown). You can run the following command to disable it regardless.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Quartz2DExtremeEnabled -boolean NO

Run this command in Terminal (found in the Utility folder in Applications). You will then need to reboot your Mac.