Inkscape Broke My Illustrator Icons

[Mike Swartzbeck]

A couple of days ago, just out of curiosity, I tried out Inkscape, decided it wasn't for me, trashed it, and removed XQuartz.

Afterwards, I found that all of my Illustrator desktop icons had changed to odd square generic document icons with the "To place or open this file in other applications..." text in the preview.



Doing a "save as copy" from the file didn't change this. Creating a new Illustrator file and saving created a normal preview, but it was still displayed in that same kind of square icon.

When opening windows, the standard .ai icons appear to flash up for a moment, but are immediately replaced by the generic square icons.

Otherwise, Illustrator works fine, no problem s I can see -- it's just that the desktop icons for Illustrator files aren't standard Illustrator file icons anymore. A minor nitpicky annoyance, granted, but I'd be interested in knowing how I can fix this.

I'm running Illustrator CS6 on a late 2013 MacBook Pro with OSX 10.8.5.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Cheryl]

After trashing Inkscape, did you restart the computer?

 

[Mike Swartzbeck]

After trashing Inkscape, did you restart the computer?

Not immediately afterwards, but have restarted every morning -- as I always do; I shut down at night before bed -- and the busted icons are still there.

 

[DeltaMac]

You likely need to rebuild OS X launch services. Part of what that does is to connect documents to their applications. Rebuilding that should fix up your icon issue, too, as they will revert to defaults.
You can easily do that by downloading OnyX, running that, and choosing to rebuild Launch Services (click on Maintenance, then Rebuilding, and check the box LaunchServices, then click Execute. When that completes, I think you have to restart your Mac for the change to appear.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/onyx.html

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

It's likely that Inkscape associated itself as the default application for Adobe Illustrator files (.ai). If you click on an Illustrator file (like the one pictured in your screenshot), do a "Get Info" on that file (either by right-clicking the file and selecting "Get Info," or highlighting the file and pressing command-i), you might be able to re-associate the file with Illustrator and thus get back the icons you're used to seeing.

Open a "Get Info" window, then, in the "Open with:" section, select "Adobe Illustrator" from the drop-down menu and then click the "Change All..." button (so that your changes apply to all .ai files, not just the current one you did a "Get Info" on).