Macos sorts file randomly (at least it seems so to me)

Question

I checked other questions, checked Apple forums - the only thing I could find is Sort by / Arrange by but in my case none of their combinations helps me to get plain "by name" option, currently I can't even find any logic in how it sorts the files:

Any help is much appreciated. I'm on macOS 10.12.6.

Answer 1

The logic is simply that the file names you're looking at are sorted numerically. Finder takes the file names and note that they start with a number - everything up to first non-number character is then sorted numerically.

I.e. from your example 9873613 < 13480567 < 39758380 < 46432537 < 81233033.

Note that some files have 7 digits, others have 8 digits.

In general Finder's sorting takes sequences of numeric digits and treat them as a single number to be sorted. Non-numeric parts are sorted alphabetically like you would expect. This system of collation is called "natural sorting".