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Forum Discussion
Menu bar icon not appearing
I used to be a Basic member but am now a member of a Family Plan. I am not able to get the Dropbox icon on my menu bar on a new Mac - Monterey 12.01. I have quit and trashed the application and hav...
Hi skiblues, thanks for joining the Community.
If you're not on a Dropbox Basic plan with more than 3 devices connected, could you try an advanced reinstall of the app using the steps in this link?
Keep me updated with any progress!
" because of menu bar space lost due to the top-center black area (for the camera), there's limited space for menu bar icons. I finally tried removing icons for apps I didn't really need in the menu bar, and as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared, and was fully functional."
Thanks, this was the fix 🙂
The reason I didn't come to this conclusion sooner was because I had a solid 2+ inches of empty menu bar space between the "notch" and the first visible menu bar icon to its right. That would have been plenty of space to fit a whole bunch of menu bar icons.
The culprit was MenuMeters. I forgot I had it installed, since it never showed up. But with 8 cpu cores and a bunch of other things displayed, it probably required at least 1/3 of my entire screen width. And it seems that since it couldn't display ALL of it, it displayed NONE of it. And worse, since MenuMeters apparently had some precedence over Dropbox, Dropbox never displayed at all. Turning ALL MenuMeters options off finally revealed the Dropbox icon.
Turning select (smaller; ie, non-CPU) MenuMeters back on now shows them to the left of Dropbox. Apparently they "stack to the left" in the order that they are enabled.
Thanks.
If you look earlier in the thread, or perhaps in a related thread, you should be able to find the fix I posted earlier:
On newer MacBook Pro models:
"...because of menu bar space lost due to the top-center black area (for the camera), there's limited space for menu bar icons. I finally tried removing icons for apps I didn't really need in the menu bar, and as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared, and was fully functional."
" as soon as there was enough space my Dropbox icon suddenly appeared"
My caution about this comment, which caused the problem to go on months longer than it needed to for me, can be found in my previous post.The key is that there was "enough space" per se for the Dropbox icon in my menu bar. Maybe close to 3" of unused space. The gotcha comes from the way macOS handles allocating space. Imagine you go out to eat at a restaurant with a date and they tell you to wait. There are tons of tables for 2 free. But there's a group of 10 ahead of you, and they don't have room for that group. And since that group came in ahead of you, they insist on seating them before they seat you.
That's the lousy algorithm Apple is using to fit things into the menu bar. In my case, MenuMeters wanted a ton of space, so Apple chose not to display either MenuMeters OR anything in line after it.
So you can't just look for free space and you can't just look at what's already displayed when you consider what to free up. You have to go hunting for anything that is even TRYING to display in the menu, and turn it off. Or at least turn it back on ONLY AFTER turning Dropbox on.
Yes! The problem was that there was not enough space for the Dropbox icon in the menu bar. The black camera notch bumped off icons that were happily in the menu bar on my old 2017 MacBook Air. After deleting some little-used icons and reinstalling Dropbox, all was well.
I can't be the only person running into this problem when moving from an older Mac to a new one that has the camera notch. It would be really helpful—and save a lot of time and stress—if the installation software or MacOS would warn the user that there was not enough space in the menu bar to install the icon.
