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”.

Image Capture Preferences

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!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 10:50 pm and is filed under OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

115 Comments

  1. daniel says:
    April 21, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    Thanks but to let people know at least the version of iphoto i am using has that feature in it know so there is no need to open up image capture

  2. RDL says:
    April 30, 2009 at 10:08 pm

    iPhoto opening all the time was driving me completely insane.

    I tried iPhoto preferences awhile back and since I didn’t see any option I assumed there wasn’t one. Glad I googled again tonight! I have put up with that extra time it takes to load iPhoto and then close it for way too long.

    I appreciate the info. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

  3. BillJanis says:
    May 1, 2009 at 8:16 am

    GREAT! Thank you very much! You would not believe all the wrong answers on the internet.

  4. Benouk says:
    May 7, 2009 at 5:19 am

    i like everyone else was about to go insane over this little feature. this is my first mac and was relaying my frustrations to a friend who simply said ‘google it’.

  5. coco says:
    May 15, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    Thanks….. it was driving me crazy that I couldn’t use preferences in iPhoto to stop it launching.

  6. Sarah says:
    May 19, 2009 at 8:31 pm

    Thanks so much! This did the trick!

  7. Billicatons says:
    May 29, 2009 at 8:53 am

    Many thanks. After enduring about 6 months’ worth of frustration on this score, I finally got round to googling it. Ha.

  8. Fez says:
    June 4, 2009 at 9:30 am

    Awsome, thanks a lot, iphoto was doing my head in!!!!!

  9. sct says:
    June 8, 2009 at 8:51 am

    Wow! You have answered my prayers. Hallelujah!

  10. rusharound says:
    June 15, 2009 at 11:50 am

    Thank you so much for this tip! So necessary!

  11. Neckel23 says:
    June 18, 2009 at 2:34 am

    Thank you so very much. I photo was driving me crazy. Very useful tip
    chears

  12. bowlandspoon says:
    June 18, 2009 at 10:59 pm

    Thanks for the great tip,
    However there is an option in iphoto preferences for this (version 8.0.3). Could be only in iphoto 09, I never looked for it in 08.
    Cheers

  13. shawn says:
    June 20, 2009 at 7:08 am

    thx!

  14. Stephen says:
    June 20, 2009 at 6:03 pm

    Thanks! This is has been driving me nuts.

  15. Jessica says:
    June 26, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    Thank you!!! This was SO obnoxious!!

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