Recent items are showing under "No Date" when sorting by date in finder

This thing's driving me crazy.

Often, when I download or create a new file, and then I have to upload it to a website or something like that, it will appear after the oldest items under a "No Date" section.

I'm running Mountain Lion but it happened for me at Lion as well.

Any ideas how to fix this?

Solution 1:

I don't know if this is really a "solution" per se, but it's a workaround that I prefer anyway: I changed the "Arrange by" to "None" as described here Mac OS X - File Open Dialog: Can't sort or resize columns

This gets rid of the categorization by Today/7 days/30 days/etc. altogether, and just gives a straightforward dialog that lets you sort however you want (be it Date Modified, or Name, or Size). I find this much more useful and fail to see the advantage of the other view (which is made almost useless by this No Date bug).

Note that some applications (e.g., MS Office) do not let you change the Auto-arrange setting. Just open up some other application that does (e.g., Chrome) and set it there (just go to Open File or similar -- you don't have to actually open the file). This action seems to set this setting globally (on 10.8.4).

This problem is all over the web. Why does Apple not comment on it? Does it not care about its users? Why does it not release a fix? Is iTunes so much more important? This bug seems almost ludicrous: The arrange-by setting used for categorization is (normally) "Date Modified", and the actual modified date is clearly shown in the Date Modified column. Indexing in the general case perhaps needs to happen not in real time (e.g., if you are viewing "All Files"), but when we open a dialog, can't just the (usually very few but most important) No Date files be manually indexed in that moment?

Solution 2:

Understanding the reason for this bug may help people handle it. The bug occurs when applications have been opened on a previous day and stay open overnight. If you use the application on the next day, it'll show files with "no date" because - in the context of that application - the file has been created in the future.

A workaround is to close the application in which you use that "Open" or "Save" dialogue and open it again. This bug is very annoying and I can't understand why Apple doesn't fix it.

Solution 3:

First, Force quit Finder. You can do this by pressing the option+command+esc keys and then selecting Finder from the list and clicking on the Relaunch button.

Then, try deleting the Finder's preferences file: com.apple.finder.plist, found in ~/Library/Preferences.

rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

This file seems to easily become corrupt. Trashing it is a good first step when Views become wacky—anything to do with Finder.