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!)

Share|
2007
09/13
CATEGORY
OS X
Write comment
    • John
    • November 4th, 2009

    On Snow Leopard with iPhoto ‘09, you can do this by setting the preference in iPhoto under the General tag -> Connecting Camera Opens -> No Application

  2. Thanks! This had been bugging me for a while. Much appreciated.

    • Damian
    • December 14th, 2009

    Thank You Thank You! man that annoyed me.. I guess I used google rather than preferences to check it out..duh

    • Tim
    • December 19th, 2009

    Thanks for the helpful tip been bugging me for ages now :D

    • callie
    • January 5th, 2010

    I thank you. My computer thanks you. Sweet baby Jesus thanks you.

    This has been annoying me for waaaaay too long.

  6. Brilliant!! I never would have figured that out in a ga-gillion years. Thank you!!

  7. Thanks so much for posting this.
    On my own computer I have Aperture loaded and I think the setting is in there. But on my wife’s computer it kept popping open iPhoto when the phone is plugged in to tether, and thats quite a bit.
    Not any more. Funny how some simple things can feel sooo good to get fixed. :)

    • jbranson
    • January 8th, 2010

    Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!!!

    • Relieved
    • January 13th, 2010

    THANK U THANK U THANK U

    • Jono
    • February 2nd, 2010

    I’m not sure if this info is out of date now but I couldn’t find to do it your way but I could find the same option under IPhoto/Preferences. Same info, just different place. Thanks! :)

  11. You’re a legend! Have a slightly elderly PowerBook G4 running 10.4.11, and this was the biggest single annoyance with my new iPhone. You’ve stopped me going mad!

    Cheers, Simon.

    • Buck
    • February 19th, 2010

    Much thanks goes to you all for this GREAT help!! I was just going STARK RAVING MAD with this nuisance, and finally found this webpage with an explanation of how to do it. At first, I didn’t get it but I got it after I connected my iPhone to the laptop.

    I have Snow Leopard 10.6, and the option is inside Image Capture.

    1) CONNECT YOUR IPHONE TO THE COMPUTER FIRST!
    2) OPEN IMAGE CAPTURE
    3) SEE THE BOTTOM ROW SHOWING THE OPTION TO OPEN AN APPLICATION WHEN CONNECTING THE IPHONE

  13. Thanks for this. I’m a fairly recent Apple convert, and so far very happy with the change. There’s just a handful of little nits where something seems like it should be so easy to change, like this, but the setting is buried somewhere that it’s hard to find.