How to disable Suggested Folders on Windows 10?

Question

Windows 10 scans the disk to find folders containing music, pictures or videos in order to generate a list of "suggested folders" for the Photos, Groove and Movies & TV apps. A quick internet search led me to this article explaining how the feature works more in detail: https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-media-files/

I'd like to disable this feature as i find it entirely redundant given the indexing capabilities brought by windows itself or popular third-party programs. Also, i don't use at all the Photos, Groove or Movies & TV apps.

I figured that the following registry keys contain the results of the scan and if i remove the content of these keys the Photos and Groove apps don't show the suggested folders anymore, but they get recreated as soon as i put more media files in my system and windows 10 finds them.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\StorageSense\SuggestedFolders\Music\Suggestions\{abunchofnumbersandletters}\

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\StorageSense\SuggestedFolders\Pictures\Suggestions\{abunchofnumbersandletters}\

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\StorageSense\SuggestedFolders\Video\Suggestions\{abunchofnumbersandletters}\

This feature appears to be related to Storage Sense but i have set it to Off in my system.

Answer 1

For anybody looking for an answer, i eventually found out that disabling the "StorageSense" task in Task Scheduler > Microsoft > Windows > DiskFootprint prevents the registry keys mentioned above from being populated, i don't know if the scan still happens in the background. I only tried for sure in Windows 10 pro 1803, so this behavior might be different under different versions.