This article is intended for enterprise and education system administrators.
On the App Store, Apple requires app developers to adhere to specific guidelines designed to protect user privacy and security. Apple also requires them to provide a privacy policy that you can review. When Apple becomes aware of an app that violates our guidelines, the developer must address the issue or the app will be removed from the App Store. In macOS Sierra 10.12 and earlier, your Mac gathers all metadata for the files in a folder, compares it to the folder's.DSStore file, and then displays the folder's contents. In macOS High Sierra 10.13 and later, this behavior is changed slightly: If a folder is sorted alphanumerically, the contents are displayed immediately, then the Finder.
Your Mac determines how each window and its contents should appear by collecting file information such as labels, tags, and other forms of metadata.
In macOS Sierra 10.12 and earlier, your Mac gathers all metadata for the files in a folder, compares it to the folder's .DS_Store file, and then displays the folder's contents. In macOS High Sierra 10.13 and later, this behavior is changed slightly: If a folder is sorted alphanumerically, the contents are displayed immediately, then the Finder collects and compares the rest of the folder's metadata.
Speed up browsing on network shares
To speed up SMB file browsing, you can prevent macOS from reading .DS_Store files on SMB shares. This makes the Finder use only basic information to immediately display each folder's contents in alphanumeric order. Use this Terminal command:
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE
Then log out of your macOS account and log back in.
Apple Store Sierra Summit
To reenable sorting, use this command:
Apple Store High Sierra
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool FALSE