I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and keep getting a request to "authenticate" how do I stop this request?

What program or process are you using to transfer the files? If you are opening the camera in the Finder and dragging them to a folder on your hard drive, what folder is it?

If this folder is in your home directory somewhere (ie, on the Desktop, or in your Pictures folder), then try rebooting your computer and holding the Command-R keys simultaneously immediately after hearing the boot chimes. This will load you to the OS X Recovery HD partition, where you can choose "Terminal" from the Utilities menu and then run the command "resetpassword" (all lowercase and one word). In the tool that pops up, select your hard drive, then your user account from the drop-down menu, and then click the button to reset home directory permissions and ACLs. This should revert any odd access settings for folders in your account that may be preventing you from accessing them without authenticating.

If you are using iPhoto then you can open the program and directly import them from there. You are overly complicating things by dragging them to your hard drive and then to your desktop. This step is likely where the system is requiring authentication.

To import them directly in iPhoto, open the program and you will see your camera show up as a device in the iphoto side bar. You can click this and choose the option to import your photos. You can also set iPhoto to automatically open whenever your attach your camera. Alternatively you can simply drag your photos from your camera to the iPhoto window to import them.

One more thing, if you were able to do this before your upgrade and not run into any authentication problems, it was likely because your system's access permissions were slightly off from the default settings and were therefore allowing you to do this. Upgrading or updating likely reverted this, and reinstated the need to authenticate when directly adding things to your hard drive (one of many locations usually reserved for administrative purposes only).

If you are transferrring to your Desktop, it should not be authenticating. Into the main hard drive, it will ask you to authenticate.

Please open Terminal and run this command. If you wish to hide your username, please copy the output to a text editor and change your username to NAME, or somthing similar.

Copy this whole line of text and paste it into Terminal, then hit return.

ls -aleO ~/

It will list the permissions on your home folder, which will help determine where the problem exists.

Based on what you posted, someone or something has already gone into those parts and triggered something worse.

You can Get Info on the Desktop folder and see what it says in the Sharing and Permissions secton.

My instructions above will not hurt your system, but only check for and reset default access permissions settings for your user account. This simply ensures everything is running as Apple set it up to run.

When it asks you to authenticate, it is likely because you are placing the files in a part of a system not intended for daily workflow. You mentioned you drag items to your hard drive and then to your desktop. The root of the hard drive is not a location intended to store files for daily use, so this is likely the cause of the authentication screens. Overcoming this is simply a matter of using a different storage place. You can drag the photos directly to your desktop instead of your hard drive, which should be directly allowable without authenticating, However, even this is an extra step that's not needed, since you can directly import the photos into iPhot without having to first put them on your desktop, your hard drive, or in another folder.

If for some reason you get the same errors when trying to copy or move the items to your desktop, then my instructions above are the route to take for correcting this and allowing you full access to your desktop (or other similar folders your account should have full ownership of) without authenticating.

Well, the "something" certainly could have been the update. There have been many posts that have similar issues after upgrading. The problems could also have existed prior to the upgrade, but the system wasn't set up to highlight the problem. Mountain Lion's permissions have changed a lot to help prevent people from doing things to their system which are not advised.