The Mac NAS Sorting Quirk, and the CMD+J Fix

Hey everyone, Romel here. Quick one today, the kind of small annoyance that eats an afternoon until you find the fix. I run a Synology DS918 on DSM 7 as my NAS, and I hit a genuinely baffling difference between how my Mac and my PC treat it.

On the PC side, the mapped NAS behaves like any other drive. I open it in File Explorer and I get full sorting right there. Sort by name, by date, by size, whatever I need, exactly like a local folder.

On the Mac, sorting is just gone. I open the same NAS folders in Finder and the normal sort options are greyed out. Only for the NAS. Local folders sort fine, but anything coming off the mapped network share refuses to give me the controls. It's the kind of inconsistency that makes you question whether you're losing it, because nothing about it is obvious.

After poking at it for a while, here's the workaround that actually works: CMD+J. That opens Finder's Show View Options panel for the current folder, and from there you can set "Sort By" manually even when the toolbar and menu options are greyed out. Pick your sort, and the folder behaves.

It's not perfect. It's an extra step every time, and it's the kind of thing that should just work the way it does on Windows. But it gets me a sorted view of my NAS on the Mac, which is all I really wanted. If you've run into the same greyed-out sorting on a network share, give CMD+J a shot before you go down the rabbit hole I did.

If you know a cleaner fix, or why macOS does this with SMB shares in the first place, I'd love to hear it. Drop it in the comments or find me on Discord.