Tracker is a file indexing and search tool for Linux. Gnome makes use of it for some of its functionality, and as a result, Tracker is installed by default.

The tool speeds up searching and enables full-text search in the Files app, makes the metadata-based batch rename feature to work in the Files app, and enables file and folder search in the Activities Overview. There are some GNOME apps that depend on it too (and don't work at all without it), like Music or Photos. Without Tracker, you'll lose these features, so take this into consideration before completely disabling Tracker.

While it brings a number of useful features to the GNOME desktop, Tracker can also have a performance impact in some cases. These performance issues are supposedly fixed. But there are still users encountering performance issues with Tracker, or users who consider it too resource intensive.

The official way of disabling Tracker on Gnome desktops is to go to Settings -> Search, and turn off the switch from the search settings headerbars (top of the window). There are users however, claiming that this does not disable it, so I decided to try it out, and after turning this option off and a system reboot, tracker status claimed it has more than 100000 files in its index, and it's currently indexing files. But you can give this a try if you wish, and see if it has any impact on your system.

So how to completely disable Tracker, so it no longer indexes any files, and stop having any Tracker process running in the background? You can mask the Tracker systemd services to completely disable it for your current user using this command:

systemctl --user mask tracker-store.service tracker-miner-fs.service tracker-miner-rss.service tracker-extract.service tracker-miner-apps.service tracker-writeback.service

After this, reset Tracker:

tracker reset --hard

CAUTION: This process may irreversibly delete data.
Although most content indexed by Tracker can be safely reindexed, it can’t be assured that this is the case for all data. Be aware that you may be incurring in a data loss situation, proceed at your own risk.

Are you sure you want to proceed? [y|N]: y
Found 3 PIDs…
Killed process 1357 — “tracker-miner-fs”
Killed process 2614 — “tracker-extract”
Killed process 42269 — “tracker-store”
_g_io_module_get_default: Found default implementation dconf (DConfSettingsBackend) for ‘gsettings-backend’
Setting database locations
Checking database directories exist
Checking database version
Checking whether database files exist
Removing all database/storage files
Removing database:'/home/cdstealer/.cache/tracker/meta.db'
Removing db-locale file:'/home/cdstealer/.cache/tracker/db-locale.txt'
Removing journal:'/home/cdstealer/.local/share/tracker/data/tracker-store.journal'
Removing db-version file:'/home/cdstealer/.cache/tracker/db-version.txt'

You could opt to uninstall the tracker completely, but it could be problematic. So instead, I disabled as above as I'm the only user. It never caused any real issues, but I don't need that level of indexing as I almost never use gnome search.

My desktop has 32Gb of RAM and was always full of cache generated by Tracker. So after disabling Tracker, I ran the following command (as root) to clear the cache in RAM.

sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches