Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Does it frustrate you that the Photos program on your Mac tries to import images every time you insert a memory card? If so, you need to read this!

For the last couple of months I have been frustrated every time I insert a memory card into my Mac. It doesn't matter whether I was using my MacbookPro or MacPro desktop machine. Every time I would insert a memory card, the darned Apple Photos program would pop up and ask me if I want to import the photos. Argghhh!!!!



As many of you know, I don't use the Photos program since it is not designed for professional use. I rely on Photo Mechanic for all my downloading and culling and then Photoshop CC for my retouching. It was driving me crazy having the Apple program interrupting my workflow and costing me valuable time. With the Summer Olympics less than 6 weeks away, and having really tight deadlines, I absolutely HAD to find a way to solve this problem.

Previous Internet searches found had a bunch of recommendations(like unchecking the "Open Photos" box and quitting the application), but none of them had worked.

But, after a lot of searching, I found the solution!

A photographer in Australia found a simple solution, and it works!

Here is what you do:

* Open the Terminal program on your Mac. If you don't know where this is located, just go to Spotlight (which is the magnifying glass at the top right of your menu bar) and type in "Terminal"



You will then see this:


Double click on the Terminal application to launch it. You will see this:




Copy this string of text:

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES
At the Terminal window, paste in that string of text and hit return. Voila - the problem in solved!

You will not see anything in the Terminal window that confirms the change, but it will be fixed from that point on.

If you ever want to reverse this change and go back to the default settings, you can paste this string into the Terminal window:

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool NO
I hope this helps all of you as much as it helped me!

Thanks to Ben Fon for finding this fix and PetaPixel for posting this online.

Feel free to share this with all of your Mac photo friends.

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4 comments:

Unknown said...

this is a beautiful thing! thank you

Unknown said...

Thank you Jeff! Man, this has been driving me crazy every time I go to download my photos!! It's so annoying. Normally, I download to an external then go directly to Lightroom so I don't need Apple Photos. Finally!!

Dave Peeters said...

Worked great, this has always been an annoyance!

Bryan S. said...

Thank you Jeff for sharing this with us! In spite of being a long-time Apple fan, this has been a tremendous source of frustration for me...to the point that I considered abandoning Macs for professional use. Like you, I don't have the time or patience to deal with such an interruption to my workflow. I have written Apple several times about this, but never received a reply/solution. Thanks a million!