Tell Your iPhone to Stop Opening iPhoto!
Every time I plugged in my iPhone, it had this nasty habit of opening iPhoto for me. Not because it wanted to drive me to drink, but because iPhoto is set to open any time a digital camera is connected to my computer – which, technically, an iPhone is.
To stop this behavior, you won’t find any preference in iTunes or iPhoto, where you would normally think to look. This little gem can be found in a separate application in your Applications folder called Image Capture.
Open Image Capture and go to the Preferences menu (under the Image Capture menu item). Under the General tab, change the option for “When a camera is connected…” to “No Application” instead of “iPhoto”.

This means you’ll have to manually start iPhoto when you connect your digital camera, but you won’t have to CLOSE iPhoto every time you plug in your iPhone (which, for me, is a heck of a lot more often than plugging in a camera!)
I could not find this under Image Capture preferences (Jan 2012), but I did find it under Iphoto preferences.. once I understood that Iphoto was thinking my phone was a camera! This has serioysly driven me nuts to thanks!!
Hey thanks for this, it was driving me barmy! Yes, I did this in Mar2012, you need to open iPhoto Preferences and select no application in there.
Thanks again
Thanks. seriously, thank you.
@Gina
Hi Gina
This has seriously re-introduced calm into my life. Many Thanks.
At least this one – of the many – annoying Apple-decided settings can be controlled… and this one was seriously annoying!!
thank you! for regular ipods all you have to do is open iphoto, go to preferences, where it says connecting camera opens: select no application.
You rock!!!!! That’s the tidbit I’ve found in a long time! That thing was sooooo annoying.
Thank you very much….
Oh thank GOD! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!
thank you sooooooo much. my iphone was triggering iphoto over and over and over again in a kind of manic way. but no more. sweet peace.
thankyou for that
Thank You so much Peace at last!