If you import thousands of images from your iPhone to the Photos app on your Mac, you might notice your MacBook getting extremely hot and the battery draining rapidly. If you open the Activity Monitor, you will see a process called photoanalysisd consuming a massive amount of CPU.
This is Apple’s background machine learning daemon. It is scanning every single pixel of your new photos to identify faces, recognize pets, and categorize images (e.g., “Beach” or “Car”) so you can search for them later. If you don’t care about Apple’s smart search features and just want your CPU back, you can safely disable this background analysis.
How to Safely Disable Mac Photo Analysisd
You must use a specific Terminal command to pause the system daemon.
- Open the Finder, go to Applications, open the Utilities folder, and double-click Terminal.
- To safely stop the background scanning daemon for the current user, type the following exact command:
launchctl disable gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd - Press Enter.
- To ensure the process is completely killed right now, type this command and press Enter:
launchctl kill -TERM gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd
The photoanalysisd process will instantly vanish from your Activity Monitor, and your Mac will cool down. The Photos app will still open normally, and you can still view all your images perfectly. However, the “People” album will stop updating, and you won’t be able to search for objects inside new photos until you re-enable the daemon (by running launchctl enable gui/$UID/com.apple.photoanalysisd).