Photos.app and excessive HDD read/write on the drive where ”Photos Library.photoslibrary” resides

[star-affinity]

It is crazy how often the drive keeps reading and writing for some reason (yes, I have a quite loud 6 TB Western Digital Black).

I also use Backblaze which I've now disabled for that specific drive, but the drive keeps being accessed a lot. Don't know what's going on really because I can't see any suspect process using much CPU in Activity Monitor. I don't have iCloud Photos enabled.

I'm now trying to repair the Photos database and see if that changes anything.

Any ideas?

Was considering getting a SSD for the Photos Library and while that would make things quiet I'd like to know why it keeps accessing the drive so much.

 

[PilotWoo]

There are a whole bunch of background processes that seem to update the Photos database every 20 minutes or so. I guess they are checking for iCloud photos updates and doing face detection and Memories etc. I would love to be able to turn it off. If you kill the processes they just respawn.

Repairing the database won't resolve it.

I don't have iCloud photos enabled either.

 

[saudor]

This happens on even older macOSes. There are hacks to reduce it via terminal (which basically deletes/disables the processes) but i find the best approach is to keep it on an external that is disconnected. Starting to get real sick of apple not giving us any options

So much for "it just works"

 

[star-affinity]

I think I managed to fix it!

The bellow command in the Terminal and a restart and the drive is much more calm now:

launchctl disable user/$(id -u)/com.apple.photoanalysisd

Here are some more info on PhotoAnalysis Daemon and some other ways (commands) to disable it:

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[star-affinity]

Just remember to re-enter the command after a macOS update, and restart the computer.
Otherwise it seems to kick in again…