This study involves the photocatalytic degradation of Aniline blue (AB) dye, employing heterogeneous photocatalytic process. Photocatalytic activity of different semiconductors such as zinc oxide (ZnO), zinc sulfide (ZnS) and Tin dioxide (SnO2) has been investigated. An attempt has been made to study the effect of process parameters through amount of catalyst, concentration of dye, pH of dye solution and temperature on photocatalytic degradation of AB solution. The experiments were carried out by varying pH (2-12), amount of catalyst (0.05–1.5 g), initial concentration of dye (25–100ppm) and temperature range (293-323) K. The optimum catalyst dose was found to be (0.1, 0.5 g and 1) g\L by using ZnO, ZnS and SnO2, respectively. In the case of ZnO and SnO2, maximum rate of photoreaction of AB solution was observed in acidic medium at pH 4, whereas the degradation of AB reached maximum at pH 5 when using ZnS catalyst. The performance of photocatalytic system employing ZnO/UV light was observed to be better than ZnS/UV and SnO2/UV system. The complete degradation of AB was observed after 12 min with ZnO, whereas with ZnS, only 75% dye degraded and 24.5% with SnO2in 12 min. Photocatalytic degradation was found to increase with increasing temperature. Arrhenius plot shows that the activation energy is equal to 20.94 kJ mol− 1 with ZnO, 17.97 kJ mol− 1 with ZnS and 14.1 mol− 1 with SnO2 catalyst. The thermodynamic parameters of the photodegradation of AB, like energy of activation, enthalpy of activation, entropy of activation and free energy of activation revealed the efficiency of the process.