how to disable photos

I have no idea what you're talking about.

This is a second reply to Terence Devlin who answered a forum poster 'kdrime' on the issue of disabling Photo from opening upon insertion of photo media in the Mac. I don't know why but I do not find my earlier post here, to which Mr. Devlin had replied he didn't know what I was talking about.

Since I cannot find that post of mine here now, please allow me to try again. And hope this response follows in context with the discussions I found above including the helpful instruction on disabling Photo from activating.

I heartily agree with the original poster that I am an adult and that I prefer to decide which apps activate under what circumstances. Therefor it was frustrating to see Photo (or 'Foto' here in Italy) activate automatically, and to NOT find a Preference, that is an item one looks for in the drop down menu inder the app name, FOTO in this case, by which one could impose one's own magisterial will upon this snarkily unruly app 🙂

No, it requires taking the next step to do exactly what this user does not want Foto to do: import photos. Only then does one discover, cleverly peeking out of the upper margin of the import window, the checkbox to turn off this behavior.

That is what I consider not-obvious and poor app design. It's a PREFERENCE: let it be found in the preference MENU.

Thank you. I hope you will see now what I am talking about, kind sir.

Does not work for me on El Capitan... Any ideas why?

I'm grateful to hear you say this. I'm having the same issue. Followed the directions very carefully and several times, but have still had the "Photos" thing pop up. 😟

i've found a way to delete photos completely!

right click 'show package contents', select the 'contents' folder and 'move to trash'. goodbye photos!

now you will have iphoto open when you insert your camera/card. no problem, do exactly the same thing. goodbye iphoto!

now image capture will open by default. hurray! the simplest app is all I need.

so the photos and iphoto icon will still be there but you will not be able to open them. if you want to really really want to delete the app icons you can use 'Clean my Mac 3' to uninstall it completely.

I just want to manage my photos in my own folders, in my own way. I don't need some dumb app to hide them away into a million nested folders concealed within a package. im a professional photographer, not a school child.

Couple of things:

1. Photos will be reinstalled with the next OS update.

2. Never let Clean My Mac 3 anywhere near your mac if you value it and your data.

3. Both Photos and iPhoto (and indeed Aperture) can manage referenced Libraries, where you can put your photos into folders as you prefer. Even if you don't, it takes most people a couple of minutes to figure put things like the export command for getting data out of these libraries.

i've found a way to delete photos completely!

right click 'show package contents', select the 'contents' folder and 'move to trash'. goodbye photos!

That should not be possible on El Capitan, because even an administrator is not allowed to delete system files and to modify system applications.

The System Integrity Protection will kick in. If you try that, you should be seeing this alert:

if you disabled the System Integrity protection, so the contents of application bundles can be modified, enable it again. It is meant to prevent malware from installing itself.

2. Never let Clean My Mac 3 anywhere near your mac if you value it and your data.

too late... why not? what is wrong with this app?

3. Both Photos and iPhoto (and indeed Aperture) can manage referenced Libraries, where you can put your photos into folders as you prefer. Even if you don't, it takes most people a couple of minutes to figure put things like the export command for getting data out of these libraries.

i never liked either app. trying to import photos takes forever. doing the same thing with image capture takes a fraction of the time. why would i want to import my photos and then have to export them again? i just want to get my photos from my phone or sd card onto my computer and then edit them in photoshop. of course this is very intuitive with photos, you just import into photos, then export each photo to make duplicate copy and then open it in photoshop and then reimport it back into photos. so simple (not).

sure it's a great app if you don't want to think about anything (ie you are technologically challenged) and you want to backup to iCloud.

i have a free 1TB account with flickr so im not in the slightest bit interested in paying for iCloud.

léonie wrote:

i've found a way to delete photos completely!

right click 'show package contents', select the 'contents' folder and 'move to trash'. goodbye photos!

That should not be possible on El Capitan, because even an administrator is not allowed to delete system files and to modify system applications.

The System Integrity Protection will kick in. If you try that, you should be seeing this alert:

if you disabled the System Integrity protection, so the contents of application bundles can be modified, enable it again. It is meant to prevent malware from installing itself.

Oh goody, I love error messages, they feed my soul. I am still using yosemite. When I updated to yosemite it broke more things than it fixed. Boy was it fun to have my laptop freeze several times while I was DJing in front of 100's of people. Boy am I glad that quick look has been totally nerfed. For sure I will not be updating to el capitan anytime soon.

Clean My Mac has a long and illustrious history of borking OS X installations and damaging user data. It offers no service that you actually need routinely. (Was it installed when you had those problems upgrading?) Search the forum of the hundreds (and hundreds) of threads on this app.

That you never liked iPhoto or Photos is good for you. I was writing for the benefit of other folks. The fact that other folks prefer other workflows means they have made their own choices, not that they are technically challenged.

Terence Devlin wrote:

Clean My Mac has a long and illustrious history of borking OS X installations and damaging user data. It offers no service that you actually need routinely. (Was it installed when you had those problems upgrading?) Search the forum of the hundreds (and hundreds) of threads on this app.

No, clean my mac had nothing to do with the problems that yosemite caused. I only installed it few days ago so that I could clear out all the junk that osx has been hoarding, including all my mail and attachments since the beginning of time. I didn't really need all of those chain emails from the early 2000's stashed on my computer anyway. This is getting extremely off topic btw.

I figure that you must mean in a terminal but it did not work for me even after a reboot.

As a developer I have over 50 iDevices that I need to connect once in a while and every time that we do a reset to factory the box pops up. It really is a pain and I cannot believe the OS makers did not see the possibilities that developers or photographers would use their OS.

still missing the ability to disable it now and for all future devices that you can connect.

And you still need to address that with Apple - http://www.apple.com/feedback/photos.html

LN

You can temporarily disable System Integrity Protection in order to delete the Photos.app package contents or whatever else you want to do. I don't recommend leaving it off permanently, so my advice is to turn it back on once you're done making changes. But for me, yeah, I hate Photos and Mail and a bunch of the other Apple apps, and I hate that they're locked down, so I temporarily turned SIP off so that I could disable those apps, and then I turned SIP on again.

There are numerous articles on how to turn off SIP so I won't outline it here. Google it or see this link: http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/05/disable-rootless-system-integrity-protection-mac- os-x/

BTW FWIW my preferred choice for disabling apps (after turning off SIP) is not to trash the package contents, but to just use "chmod 000 [app name]" in Terminal so that the app is forbidden to ever launch. It's quick and easily reversible if you ever change your mind. But others will prefer other methods.

Hope this is helpful. And don't forget to turn SIP back on when you're done! :-)