How do I get rid of 'CSU taxonomy database' in the Photos app?

That's the database that Photo's AI uses to categorize flowers, shrubs and other plants. If you delete it you'll damage the library and possibly make it unusable.

Everything in the library's package is designed to be there and necessary.

In addition to flowers, shrubs and other plants I also found animals and landmarks like Lady Liberty or Canterbury Cathedral indexed in that database, all relevant objects in our photos. The files are relatively small, at least in my library. We would not save much storage by getting rid of them.

If you don't want to use AI then the simple answer is: don't use Photos. It's not compulsory, there are alternatives.

The app is offered and licensed to you 'as-is'. If you don't like the offering, and the offering doesn't give you the options to disable bits and pieces you don't like, then the solution is to use an application that works the way you prefer.

And why do you want to "get rid of it?"

I see that I have these "customary" files in my Library packages and in my User's Library. These are hardly the only files that I don't have any idea what they do. I'm not deleting any of them!

markwmsn wrote:

The recognition of flowers, animals, landmarks, and such has been in Photos since before the introduction of Apple Intelligence.

Exactly. Since macOS Sierra, Version 10.12 in 2017 has Photos been scanning our Photos automatically to recognize objects and classify them according to categories, like concert, sporting event etc. And face recognition has been available already in Aperture and iPhoto. What is new, is the introduction of AI in the editing tools.like Clean Up or image generation, like Image Playground. These tools require a lot of processing power and are better on the new models with dedicated hardware.

I am not surprised that Photos is making heavy use of AI tools. The Photos.app is available on nearly all Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac, Vision Pro, iCloud) and one design principle for Photos has been the desire to make the user interface similar on all platforms for a unified experience. The second design principle is code sharing - using the same frameworks on all platforms, whenever possible for an easier maintenance and more compatibility.

This is a very hard requirement, given the different display sizes and methods of interaction. You may have noticed, that Apple has been very frugal with menu commands. Apple is encouraging us to use Siri instead of using the graphical user interface. And the most common tasks, when structuring our Photos Libraries are now done automatically by Photos using AI - and there are many predefined collections, so we do not need to create them for ourselves. There are not even the tools to do that on or own. On a Mac we still have smart albums and keywords in Photos, but they have never come to the iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro. We are limited to the predefined collections and the search based on the AI results. I am using them as a starting point to build my own view of the library on top of it, with folders, albums, smart albums and keywords. And sync the structure from my Mac to the other devices with iCloud Photos.

Even the layout is based on the AI results (since macOS 10.15 Catalina). If we do not disable it, we are only seeing a curated selection of the photos, cropped and tiled, and cannot even tell by the cropped square, if a photo is a panoramic shot or a portrait photo. The tiled "Days" view is currently pretty useless, as none of the photos is shown, as I have cropped it for the best composition. I wish, the developers and designers would show more respect for the artistic taste of the customers.

hartwig290 wrote: As I said open your "System Photo Library" (this is not a file but actually a folder) and then look into folder "internal" - "csutaxonomy". There, you find the sqlite3 database.

In fact the Library is a "package" which is a folder designed to discourage people from messing around in it. Altering the contents, inadvertently or otherwise, may make the pictures unusable. The edited pictures aren't stored inside (except for some lower resolution copies for faster scanning,) but rather they are created from the data stored in there, which can be easily damaged. So if you do go messing around in there, be sure you have a backup copy of the Library.

It's ironic-- Windows users have found that their OS has added an empty folder that people want to delete, since its value isn't obvious to them. Microsoft is warning against deleting the folder.

Where did you find it? That will give you a clue to unlock your queries.

The recognition of flowers, animals, landmarks, and such has been in Photos since before the introduction of Apple Intelligence.