How to turn off auto-open of iPhoto in OS 10.11.6?

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Level 1

4 points

How to turn off auto-open of iPhoto in OS 10.11.6?

How to turn off auto-open of iPhoto in OS 10.11.6 on my Mac, when I up load photos for my camera's SD card.

I up load from my camera's 32 GB and 64 GB SD cards to my Mac for post production work. I often use Image Capture or 3rd party software to upload for quick sorting. After Apples most recent OS update when I insert my SD card in to the card reader, I'm now force to wait while iPhoto auto-opens and auto-loads all photos on the SD card. This forces all other software to wait (Image Capture and 3rd party software) till iPhoto is done. I then close iPhoto and get on with uploading photos as usual. This time consuming act just started with Apples newest update of OS 10.11.6 and I can find no way to turn off "auto-open" in iPhoto. Is there any way to short of deleting iPhoto all together to stop auto-open?

My Mac:

Hardware: 24" early 2009, 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Software: iPhoto v 1.5 runningn on OS v 10.11.6

iMac (24-inch Early 2009), OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Sep 6, 2016 1:41 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 6, 2016 3:18 PM in response to Karl WS

Open iPhoto and go to it's General preference pane. Set the "Connecting camera opens" setting to No application.

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Answer 2

Karl WS Author

Level 1

4 points

Sep 8, 2016 10:17 AM in response to Karl WS

Thanks for the suggestion, but as you can see Photo's General preference box has changed.

This is a screen clip showing what happens when I open General preference pane in Photo. Sense Apple's last update OS v 10.11.6 I no longer have iPhoto it's been changed to plain Photo. Has Apple change iPhoto to Photo for some reason and could this be the problem? As you can see I no longer have the chose to turn off auto-open, there is simply no "Connecting camera opens".

Any ideas how to resolve this?

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Answer 3

léonie

Level 10

200,705 points

Sep 8, 2016 10:29 AM in response to Karl WS

You have been asking about iPhoto. Photos for Mac is a completely different application.

Do you want to stop iPhoto from opening or Photos for Mac?

Stop iPhoto as described in the previous post.
For Photos for Mac you have to disable it for each of your camera cards separately, and if you reformat the card it will be seen as a different device, then you have to disable it again. When Photos launches, after you insert a card, disable the flag "Open Photos for this device" below the upper left corner of the Toolbar. That will prevent photos from launching for this card until you reformat it.

A brute-force method to stop any application from launching at all when you insert a card is a Terminal command:

This Terminal command will disable the auto start of any photo application, not just Photos. So Lightroom or any other application will not launch either and you will have to launch the application of your choice manually.

Quit Photos and disconnect any camera.
Open a Terminal and paste this command into it and hit return:

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.Photos disableHotPlug -bool YES

Restart the Mac . it should not be necessary, but it only worked for me after restarting. I found this fix in a post by JadedEye

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