MacCentric Solutions

As all sensible people know, Apple products don’t have “bugs”; they have “features.” And certainly I would be remiss in my job as president of a Mac consulting firm, a.k.a. High Worshipers of the Cult of Steve, if I were to pronounce an utterance even hinting at disgruntlement with any of His Jobnesses’ creations.

However, I will admit that there’s one thing about the iPhone that bugs me.

If the phone has any new photos on it when you plug it into your Mac, the computer will automatically launch iPhoto.

I can see how Apple thought this would be helpful; after all, if you took a picture with your phone, there’s an excellent chance that you want to share it with somebody else, or at least make a copy on your Mac as a backup.

However, as an I.T. guy always flying between appointments, running twenty concurrent applications on my poor, maxxed-out MacBook (black, of course), I sometimes just wanna put the latest podcasts on my phone and be off to my next customer. I’m not really interested, on Monday at 8:59 a.m., in sending Aunt Helen the latest pics from my weekend in Death Valley.

In other words, I don’t really care to deal with iPhoto every time I plug in my iPhone.

Luckily, there’s an easy way out of this CPU-cycle-burning predicament. You can configure your Mac to only import photos when you choose. Here’s how.

First, open Image Capture from your Mac’s Applications folder.
Go to the Image Capture menu, at the top left of the screen, and select Preferences.
From the menu “When a camera is connected, open,” select No Application.

Press OK, and you’re done!

Keep in mind that this will stop iPhoto from opening when you plug in any camera whatsoever, not just the iPhone. The simple fix for this is to just open iPhoto manually when you want to import photos. That’s fine with me: I’ll email Aunt Helen on my own time.

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Keep iPhoto from auto-launching