Dead Easy Hack To Stop Apple Photos’ Self Launching Behavior

What is it exactly about ‘hacks’ that has all of us so, how shall I put this, obsessed? There are YouTube channels and Encyclopedia Britannica volume’s worth of every type of hack imaginable, to the point where you sort of need a hack to find just the best ones because there’s a lot of rubbish out there. Want to turn an orange into a candle? Didn’t think so, but that’s there. Want to hack your way into bed with your wife and her best friend? Well, you’re out of luck. But really, hacks are just innovative, resourceful, perhaps simpler or quicker or efficient ways to do something.

In my experience, photography hacks are generally marketed as money saving alternatives, or as shortcut methods to do something. The problem with the latter is that it’s also been my experience that really these things tend to simply be tutorials on how to do something the right way. After all, a shortcut has to have some sort of cost to it. Otherwise, it would just be ‘the way’. If you want to learn a whole host of ways to do things in photography then just peruse our posts, and you can start with this Lightroom tutorial for a start, or maybe a really quick one right here.

If you’re running a moderately modern Apple computer, there’s a good chance you’re running Apple’s Yosemite OS, and probably have Apple Photos as part of your suite of applications. Apple made quite a big deal about it this year, and while it certainly has its merits, no moderately professional photographer I know uses it often, if at all. But that hasn’t stopped Apple trying to get you to because it seems every time you connect a phone or iDevice, or camera, or memory card to your computer, the damn thing opens up without your asking it to do so.

[REWIND: HOW TO MOVE IMAGES FROM ONE LIGHTROOM CATALOGUE TO ANOTHER]

This self-launching behavior has annoyed many to no end, and while you are able to tell the computer not to do it, you have to tell it that for every device, including memory cards which are also viewed as new if they’ve been recently formatted. The frustration was too much for one lovely Reddit user, Ben Fon, who shared a way to ultimately disable the self-launching app via the use of a single line of text into Terminal. All you do is open Terminal, enter the following, and press Enter. Done.

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

That’s all there is to it, and if you ever want to revert to the old way just do the same and switch the YES to a NO. My utter gratitude to Ben for this, you have saved some of my sanity.

Source: PetaPixel, Reddit