Preventing Photos Auto-Start

If you are a photographer using anything but an iPhone for your work, chances are that the Photos app drives you nuts. I mean its aggressive nature to jump on any media or camera connected. Although you can disable this auto-start for cameras one by one, CF and SD cards are still an issue, as there’s no way to disable the auto-start for them on the user interface.

So here’s the trick: disable it globally. Open Terminal and copy & paste the following commands:

On OS X 10.10 (Yosemite):

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture2 HotPlugActionPath -string ""

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture2 LastHotPlugActionPath -string ""

On OS X 10.11 (El Capitan):

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

You may need to log out and back on for the changes to take effect.