How To Stop IPhoto Automatically Opening When You Connect Your IPhone Or IPad To Your Mac

How To Stop IPhoto Automatically Opening When You Connect Your IPhone Or IPad To Your Mac

There’s nothing worse than plugging in your iPhone or iPad into your Mac to give it a little extra juice or sync over a few songs or podcasts only to be greeted by iPhoto. Ok, there are worse things, but it’s still super annoying to have an application you didn’t ask for pop up in your face and have to dismiss it, especially when it happens… Every. Single. Time.

Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to stop this behavior and lower your stress levels. Truth be told, it’s pretty easy to achieve too.

Option 1

If you never want iPhoto to pop up, regardless of what device you plug in — be it an iPhone, iPad, digital camera or any other device you computer views as a camera — you can turn it off entirely. To do so, follow the instructions below:

How To Stop IPhoto Automatically Opening When You Connect Your IPhone

  1. Open iPhoto.
  2. In the menu bar, go to iPhoto > Preferences.
  3. In the General menu, you’ll see an option for “Connecting camera opens”. In the drop down box you’ll see iPhoto is selected — change this to “No application”.
  4. Close the Preferences window and you’re done.

Bear in mind that this option prevents iPhoto from opening automatically for any camera-like device, so you’ll have to open the program manually. Your connected devices will still show up in iPhoto when the program is opened manually.

Option 2

How To Stop IPhoto Automatically Opening When You Connect Your IPhone Or IPad

If you don’t want iPhoto to open when you plug in your iPhone or iPad but you do want it to open when you attach another camera, there’s a solution for you too. Here’s how to turn off iPhoto’s pesky auto-opening behavior on a per-device basis:

  1. Connect your iPhone or iPad and wait for iPhoto to open.
  2. Once iPhoto is open, open the Finder app and select Applications from the left-hand menu.
  3. In the Applications list select and open Image Capture.
  4. When Image Capture is open, click the arrow-like icon in the bottom left corner of the window.
  5. You’ll now see a drop-down menu for something along the lines of “Connecting this iPhone opens”. This is likely set to iPhoto, so go ahead and change it to “No application”.
  6. Close Image Capture and you’re done.

You’ll have to complete this process for each device you have but, while ever so slightly trickier, it does give you the flexibility to have iPhoto auto-open for certain cameras meaning you only see iPhoto when you want to!

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