How To Stop iPhoto From Opening on Your Mac When You Connect Your iOS Device

I don’t know about you, but it irritates me just a bit whenever I connect my iOS device to my Mac and iPhoto pops up. Sure, I like to move my device’s photos over to my Mac from time to time, but 90% of the time, I’m just looking for a quick battery top-up.

By default, OS X opens iPhoto whenever you connect your iOS device to your Mac via the Lightning sync cable. Many of us turned this off in Mavericks, but SURPRISE! It’s turned back on when you upgrade to OS X Yosemite.

Sure, it seems like there would be a setting in iPhoto to turn this off, but this is one of those times Apple pulled a fast one on users and hid the setting in another app. One you might not even think of looking in.

Follow these steps to turn off iPhoto’s auto-startup when you connect your iOS device to your Mac:

1. Connect your iOS device to your Mac via your Lightning or 30-pin sync cable. (iPhoto will open one last time, go ahead and close it.)
2. Open the Image Capture app. (It’s in your Applications folder.)
3. Click on your iOS device in the left-hand pane.
4. At the bottom left of the Image Capture window, you’ll see a pull-down option allowing you to select what happens when your connect this iOS device to your Mac. (You may need to click the tiny “up” arrow in the lower left corner before you see this option.)
5. The top option is “No application.” Click that option to select it.
6. Close out the app. iPhoto should no longer pop-up every time you connect you iOS device to you Mac.

If you have “Photos in the Cloud” turned on in your iOS device settings you won’t see this option, since you can no longer add photos to iPhoto when connecting your iOS device.

Thanks to Kirk McElhearn, (via The Loop), for the original tip.