Missing Syncplicity overlay icons

A lot of Synplicity users also use other file synchronization applications depending on the purpose of the data they want to back up. Like Syncplicity, most of them put visual indicators over the file/folder icon to let you know what their status is (syncing, synced, etc.). These are called overlays in Windows and the OS only displays the top 15 overlays.

An issue may occur when the user has more than a couple of file sync apps installed at once. For example, Dropbox uses 8 icon overlays, OneDrive uses 7, so that leaves no room for Syncplicity and its icon overlays will disappear. Our desktop app does offer a built-in tool that edits the registry entries related to our overlays and makes sure they always stay within the top 15 of the overlays list. However, with time and with every update, other software has also started to aggressively prioritize their own.

In cases where this built-in tool cannot fix the priority of app overlays so Windows can display the ones related to Syncplicity, you can try to manually rearrange them. Here are some instructions on how you can do this:

1. Open the Registry Editor. You can press Windows + R, type 'regedit', and press 'Enter'.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ShellIconOverlayIdentifiers. This is the list of installed icon overlays.
3. Identify Syncplicity's icon overlays. For each of them, right-click the key and choose 'Rename'.
4. Now insert a space in front of the name. That will bump it to the top of the list. Make sure that entries related to other apps don't have a space at the beginning of their name. Alternatively, you can use three spaces for your top-priority app, two for the second most important, and so on.
5. Close Regedit and restart the PC.

After following the steps above, you should be able to see Syncplicity's icon overlays on every file or folder you're actively syncing with Syncplicity.