How to stop 'Photos.app' from autolaunching....

What annoys me most since its appearance:
Fotos/Photos (who came up with such a lame name??) auto-launches on inserting my SDCards... when I want to import into FCPX - no Photos needed!!!

Apple tells to uncheck a lil' box, 'Open Photos for this device' … nice try, when using my iPhone or iPod...

But, following best-practice, I format my cards in my cameras; which, prohibts Photos to recognize "ahh, hands-off, this device!", obviously, there are some 'hidden' infos which change the 'internal name' of the card on each formatting..... at last on my cameras.-

Finally found this lil' gem at
petapixel.com/2015/12/21/stop-apple-phot...-x-with-one-command/

I have absolutely no clue about Unix, command lines etc. so, I was a lil' hesitant - but it works:
launch Terminal from your Apps/Utilities folder
copy/paste:
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES
hit enter

... no more autolaunch!! phewww, finally.

replace YES by NO, and Photos autolaunches back again.....

Yes, unfortunately, camera cards are always unique every time they're inserted. Had this issued when we spent two weeks shooting our TV show in Colorado. Very annoying, and very cumbersome, interrupting our very hectic, non-stop, reality TV workflow. The line works very well, and is very popular. Wish Apple would build this command into a preference for Photos. Saved our workflow. And all I did for our camera cards, was select all content, move it to the Trash, empty trash. None of the various cameras used had any issues when re-inserting the cards into them. They all just created new databases from scratch. GoPro Hero 3 & 4, Canon C100 Mk II, ZenMuse, couple others I can remember off hand. We even named the cards, and only the C100 Mk II's would rename them to Untitled. Camera manufacturers need to make these cards more user friendly and cut the outdated, totally unnecessary crap.

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool NO

NO at the end stops Photos from launching, replace with YES to have it auto-launch again.

I've even turned it off on my personal laptop and MP.

Good post, Karsten! Now if someone good with Automator or Apple Script could make us a script app to do this...

It may not be elegant but here you go:

To stop Photos from auto-launching run this in Applescript or create an Automator workflow to run this script:


set the clipboard to "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES"

tell application "Terminal"
activate
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "v" using {command down}
keystroke return
end tell
end tell


As noted by Karsten and BenB you can replace the "YES" with a "NO" at the end of the "set the clipboard to" statement to reverse the process.

Note: it does leave the Terminal app open after accomplishing the task - maybe someone can fix that.

Use a "quit application" command

set the clipboard to "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES"
tell application "Terminal"
activate
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "v" using {command down}
keystroke return
end tell
quit application "Terminal"
end tell

I'd like it to prompt weather to use YES or NO, but I've not fooled with AppleScript in ages and am clueless. You also have to tell Terminal to "exit" at the command line, or I find it sometimes asks if you REALLY want to close the window.

Anyway, here's two AppleScript apps that I made, one to start, one to stop.
AutoLaunchScripts.zip

I believe all you have to do with Automator is to use the Run Shell Script action and paste the command "defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool NO" in that action. Save the Automator project as either a Workflow, Application or as a Service. Service is available in a Finder window.

Yup, that's it. Thanks, Ben.

EDIT:
Buddy from Apple and I put together an app to do this all for you easily. Will be posting it soon.

Well, we have an app to handle this, and it will be posted soon, for free. Thanks y'all for inspiring this. I've been doing the command line manually in my DIT work for the current show I'm supervising. This makes life WAY easier. Stay tuned!