Disabling photoanalysisd

disabling-photoanalysisd.md

For what it's worth (and with all the usual disclaimers about potentially making your mac unstable by disabling system services), here's some commands that will manipulate this service and services like it. Note the $UID in the command, that's just a bash shell variable that will resolve to some number. That's your numeric UID. You just run these commands from a Terminal command line. No special privileges needed.

If you want to disable it entirely, the first command stops it from respawning, and the second kills the one that is currently running:

launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd
launchctl kill -TERM gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

(If you kill it without disabling it will die, but a new one will respawn and pick up where the old one left off)

I don't have this problem myself, so I can't try these next two commands. They're relying on good ole UNIX signals. You could theoretically suspend and resume the process like this ("STOP" and "CONT" are stop and continue):

launchctl kill -STOP gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd
launchctl kill -CONT gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd

I don't know what launchd does when running processes are suspended for a long time. Will it detect them as dead and kill and restart them? I dunno. But I do know they won't get any CPU time.

on monterey I need to periodically run the kill command. If I only kill it once, it starts again in about one minute. I did setup a crontab job where I run this script:

*/1 * * * * /Users/mac/stopmediaanalysisd.sh

% cat /Users/mac/stopmediaanalysisd.sh
for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6; do 
launchctl disable user/501/com.apple.photoanalysisd
launchctl disable user/501/com.apple.mediaanalysisd
launchctl kill INT gui/501/com.apple.photoanalysisd
launchctl kill INT gui/501/com.apple.mediaanalysisd
sleep 9
done

then check logs to see it gets terminated. note the kind termination SIGINT signal.
% log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.duetactivityscheduler"' | grep --line-buffered RUN | grep --line-buffered media