Snow Leopard: Disable iPhoto from Opening When You Connect an iPhone

December 19, 2009

The Image Capture Preference Pane

In Snow Leopard, Image Capture allows you to set a default application to open on a per device basis.

Snow Leopard is abound with small tweaks here and there that are really quite nice. I just noticed a new one this morning that is very useful.

In previous versions of OS X, you could use Image Capture to set a preferred application to launch (or not) when you attached a camera to the Mac.  My first run-in with this preference came because I wanted to disable iPhoto from launching every time I connected my iPhone.

The common complaint with how this worked in Leopard was that Image Capture managed this as a global setting, i.e. I could tell my Mac to not launch iPhoto when any camera was connected, but I couldn’t say don’t launch iPhoto for my iPhone, however do launch it for my Canon DSLR.  This led to some fairly clever, but hacky workarounds requiring Applescript.

However now in Snow Leopard, Apple has updated Image Catpure so you can set this preference on a per device basis.  A small tweak, but much appreciated.

  • etpetersen
    Hi Ken,

    Thanks for the writeup... it helped me solve this pesky problem.... only now i have another "Pesky" problem. I ended up taking some pretty cool pictures on my iPhone and now I can't seem to get iPhoto to recognize the iPhone for import. Any ideas how to get it to load under "devices" when I want it to?
  • Not sure... the only thing this setting should impact is to stop iPhoto from launching; the iPhone should still mount under Devices. I just checked on my Mac to ensure I wasn't missing anything and it did mount up just fine as a Device. I would "re-enable" iPhoto to launch when you mount the iPhone and see if the iPhone mounts properly just to isolate that is in fact what is causing the problem.
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