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com.apple.mediaanalysisd filling out my entire SSD on my Mac mini! What to do??

Phat^Trance

Phat^Trance

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 9, 2009
553
47
The process com.apple.mediaanalysisd (in systemdata) is filling up my entire Mac mini SSD (80gb so far). Does anyone know how i can stop this? I downloaded the CCleaner to clean up some system data (including the com.apple.mediaanalysisd file) but a week later the damn process starts filling out my entire SSD again.

I have around 20gb free space on my SSD and the damn com.apple.mediaanalysisd taking up 80gb, and im getting warnings from macos that my internal SSD is getting low on space.

I do have around 80.000 photos stored on a external 4TB SSD (with 2TB free space). Is it possible to make the "com.apple.mediaanalysisd" to use that SSD instead? or is there a way to turn is this process or make is stop filling out my entire internal SSD?

im on the latest version of MacOS!
 
What do you mean by "the process is filling up my entire Mac mini SSD"? Are you referring to the memory the process consumes (as reported in Activity Monitor)? Or does the process create files (or a single file) that occupy space on your drive?
 
zevrix said:
What do you mean by "the process is filling up my entire Mac mini SSD"? Are you referring to the memory the process consumes (as reported in Activity Monitor)? Or does the process create files (or a single file) that occupy space on your drive?
Click to expand...

No, its filling out the ssd storage
 
..where is this file?

You can probably just delete it. Or quit the process and delete it. Or delete it and restart.
 
zevrix said:
Ok. And how exactly does this filling out of the storage manifest itself? Can you post a screenshot of the files that fill out the ssd storage?
Click to expand...
It seems to be a lot of .bundle files, im not able to open them. Check the screenshots! All these created just today. and this happening every day.
SCR-20241201-u93.png
 
!!! said:
..where is this file?

You can probably just delete it. Or quit the process and delete it. Or delete it and restart.
Click to expand...

Its located here: /Users/phattrance/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/
It doesnt matter if i remove the entire folder, macos will add new ones the next day and fill out the entire SSD drive with these junk files. So i need to make it stop, than deleting them every day :)
 
Phat^Trance said:
It seems to be a lot of .bundle files, im not able to open them. Check the screenshots! All these created just today. and this happening every day.
Click to expand...

yeah this is nuts. to open a bundle, you can right click it > Show Package Contents.

i personally don't know anything about this process. but a google search demonstrates that many users experience issues with mediaanalysisd:
www.google.com

ð "mediaanalysisd" - Google Search

www.google.com

maybe you can find an answer somewhere there.

Howard Hoakley specifically often provides useful info:
eclecticlight.co

Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?

Can it be true that Apple is sent information about every image we browse in the Finder? Analysis of Visual Look Up and Live Text and when it happens.
eclecticlight.co eclecticlight.co
 
zevrix said:
yeah this is nuts. to open a bundle, you can right click it > Show Package Contents.

i personally don't know anything about this process. but a google search demonstrates that many users experience issues with mediaanalysisd:
www.google.com

ð "mediaanalysisd" - Google Search

www.google.com

maybe you can find an answer somewhere there.

Howard Hoakley specifically often provides useful info:
eclecticlight.co

Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?

Can it be true that Apple is sent information about every image we browse in the Finder? Analysis of Visual Look Up and Live Text and when it happens.
eclecticlight.co eclecticlight.co
Click to expand...


This is what i could find when opening the .bundle

1733086920657.png



And when i continue opening the bundle i found this. i have no idea what this is or why it filles out my entire SSD
any ideas?

1733086964059.png
 
Phat^Trance said:
I do have around 80.000 photos stored on a external 4TB SSD (with 2TB free space).
Click to expand...
Are these 80,000 photos stored in a Photos Library? Or just as files visible in Finder?

I ask because my medianalysisd was consuming lots of CPU analysing 35,000 photos in a Photos library on an external disk. But it did not struggle with photos outside the Photos library. My case was different, CPU not disk space. And it calmed down after 1) poking it a bit, and/or 2) it finished whatever it doing, and/or 3) macOS update from 15.0 to 15.1.

You might get some idea by watching what files it has open. Activity Monitor > Select medianalasysd > Get info (i in a circle at the top) > Open Files and Ports. It will probably ask for an administrator password.
 
My Mac is creating the same temp files, but it’s only done 3 GB so far. It also seems to have cleaned some of them up on its own since they now only go back to Nov 20.

I believe this has something to do with Apple Intelligence’s indexing of photos.

From some posts in this thread on https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255835917?sortBy=rank it seems like Apple may have fixed this in 15.2, which should be out in a week or two.
 
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gilby101 said:
Are these 80,000 photos stored in a Photos Library? Or just as files visible in Finder?

I ask because my medianalysisd was consuming lots of CPU analysing 35,000 photos in a Photos library on an external disk. But it did not struggle with photos outside the Photos library. My case was different, CPU not disk space. And it calmed down after 1) poking it a bit, and/or 2) it finished whatever it doing, and/or 3) macOS update from 15.0 to 15.1.

You might get some idea by watching what files it has open. Activity Monitor > Select medianalasysd > Get info (i in a circle at the top) > Open Files and Ports. It will probably ask for an administrator password.
Click to expand...

All photos and videos are stored in the Photos Library :)
My mediaanalysisd also get a high CPU when adding new photos, but it goes back to standard again after it scanned everything, the problem i have now is that the dam process is just writing the same **** over and over again and filling out my SSD in no time :(
 
Morac said:
My Mac is creating the same temp files, but it’s only done 3 GB so far. It also seems to have cleaned some of them up on its own since they now only go back to Nov 20.

I believe this has something to do with Apple Intelligence’s indexing of photos.

From some posts in this thread on https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255835917?sortBy=rank it seems like Apple may have fixed this in 15.2, which should be out in a week or two.
Click to expand...

yeah im suspecting it to, but my problem is that it wont stop adding the same ting over and over again until the drive is full :/
The files cover around 140gb now, it was 90gb yesterday!
 
mediaanalysisd can be disabled.
Disable SIP - csrutil disable from Terminal in Recovery & reboot.
Terminate the process mediaanalysisd
Code: 
launchctl bootout gui/501/com.apple.mediaanalysisd
Disable mediaanalysisd
Code: 
launchctl disable gui/501/com.apple.mediaanalysisd

To re-enable
Code: 
launchctl enable gui/501/com.apple.mediaanalysisd
and reboot
 
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I happened to notice there is an Apple Intelligence storage usage indicator in the General -> Storage settings. Clicking on the "i" circle next to MacOS, brings up a window that shows how much space "Apple Intelligence" is taking up. Mine is currently showing 4.92 GB which is about 1 GB larger than what's stored in the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd folder.

I'm curious what it's showing for people with huge cache sizes?
 
Morac said:
I happened to notice there is an Apple Intelligence storage usage indicator in the General -> Storage settings. Clicking on the "i" circle next to MacOS, brings up a window that shows how much space "Apple Intelligence" is taking up. Mine is currently showing 4.92 GB which is about 1 GB larger than what's stored in the ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mediaanalysisd/Data/Library/Caches/com.apple.mediaanalysisd folder.

I'm curious what it's showing for people with huge cache sizes?
Click to expand...
This is what im getting when pressing ther "i" button next to macOS, probably due to that i live in EU (sweden) and we dont have it here yet!


1733741046917.png
 
Oh thank god I'm not the only one. I'm moving all 70GB to an external drive, and then I'm going to soft-link the directory in the hopes that the daemon doesn't really care about where the directory lives. (This is not guaranteed to work; if you move Messages data to another drive, Messages will ignore it, presumably for security reasons.)

If it works, I'll report back.

This is a wildly irritating problem, especially since the 'Storage' tab in Settings doesn't even hint that this is an issue. I've got 135GB of 'system' files but it won't tell me anything else about them. I only discovered this because I ran GrandPerspective on the drive.

Update: A soft-linked directory doesn't work, unfortunately. I've managed to update to 15.2 though, so hopefully that'll fix the issue. But if not, I'm just going to turn the daemon off--I'd rather search for most photos on my phone or iPad anyway.
 
Last edited:
Morac said:
My Mac is creating the same temp files, but it’s only done 3 GB so far. It also seems to have cleaned some of them up on its own since they now only go back to Nov 20.

I believe this has something to do with Apple Intelligence’s indexing of photos.

From some posts in this thread on https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255835917?sortBy=rank it seems like Apple may have fixed this in 15.2, which should be out in a week or two.
Click to expand...

Oh, of course it's fixed in 15.2, which I can't upgrade to, because my drive is full from 15.1 barfing all over it.
 
Any update on this? I'm running 15.2, yet I see .bundle files getting added each day.
Currently the folder has 139 .bundle files, each being 68.2MB for a total of 9GB.
I only have 30GB free on my 256GB drive, so it would be nice if macOS didn't have so aggressive caching. Or what even are these .bundle files doing?
 
I'm on 15.2 as well with an M1 Mac Mini and i have the same issue. All the time the OS is telling me i'm out of space and this is the culprit. Really annoying.
 
This has been happening to me for months now. 68.2mb bundle files created ON EVERY USER ACCOUNT. I just deleted about 50GB worth today because Photoshop wouldn't open because of lack of disk space. I guess this is my new part time job, deleting these stupid files. I only have a 256GB drive so this is pretty annoying. But it wouldn't matter how big the drive was because sooner or later it would fill the entire damn thing with these files. Please Apple, fix this! Running 15.2, so it is NOT fixed yet.
 
I've just updated to 15.3 Beta 3 (M1). And I have 66 Gb free space now 🥳 Few minutes ago I had 9 Gb after cleaning.
 
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