Today, I noticed a image I downloaded earlier (one of two) has a large gray circle at the right-hand edge of the Name column in Finder:
Note that the other image made at almost the same time doesn't have it.
This is not a tag. When adding the gray tag to the file, it looks like this, with a second small gray circle.
The large gray circle is something different. What is it?
This is macOS Sierra, 10.12.4, on a 2013 model Macbook Pro. Last night, when the image was made, neither had a gray circle. It's appeared sometime in the last 24 hours.
Edit: the file is located in Downloads, and (edited from original) was actually a downloaded file from Chrome. I do not have iCloud sync enabled for files. The gray circle was not present last night or earlier today; in fact since I posted the question, the circle has disappeared, reappeared, and disappeared again – only for this file and no others.
Best Answer
Thanks for clarifying the question about the location and your OS.
In your case, the grey dot is a progress indicator for a downloaded file. It used to be a horizontal bar, filling up as the download progresses. Now it's a circle filling up clockwise.
Sometimes, the circle does not disappear, like in your case, indicating an incomplete download.
IMO, it is not directly an application problem, since I have seen this behaviour in Google Chrome as well as Opera and Safari. There was a report here on SE about this being a bug in Chrome (see here), but in the comments, you see other users had had it happened in other apps as well.
Since the file still opens, it seems to be a finder refresh problem for which there are several solutions.
I hope it clarifies this problem a bit.