iPhone: Please stop launching iPhoto!

If you have an iPhone you may have noticed that when you plug it into a Macintosh, iPhoto launches right along with iTunes. I don’t mind iTunes launching as it is there to synchronize my music, and I have it open all the time anyway, but why iPhoto?

The reason why it is opening iPhoto is that OS X sees the iPhone as also being a camera. As with other camera’s, its default action is to (you guessed it) wake up iPhoto. I don’t use my phone to take pictures much, and I certainly don’t need iPhoto to open every time I sit my phone on its cradle to get a bit of juice. So, I poked around to figure out how to make it stop.

After fruitless adventures in both iPhoto and the iPhone’s Preferences/Setting (although seemingly the right places to look) I got a good lead on how to change the behavior. The application that controls how the Mac responds to how to handle what happens when a camera is plugged in is the Image Capture application, not iPhoto (and that’s the one kicker here-if you make this change, iPhoto will not automatically open for any camera).

To change the behavior:

1. Open Image Capture (in your Applications directory)
2. Open the Preferences panel (Image Capture > Preferences…)
3. Change the drop down following “When a camera is connected, open:” to “No application”

That’s it.

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