Ever noticed that every time you plug your iPhone into your Mac, OSX launches iPhoto? iPhoto is like a little terrier offering to help you; ” ‘woof’ do you want me to import those pictures for you?”
Nice when you want to import some photos but it can become a pain when you continually have to close down iPhoto as you’re just wanting to charge your iPhone.
What about this one. You have two cameras, one that you take some happy snaps with and another that you use for work. The first you want to import into iPhoto as you use that for your family weekend shots, while you use Aperture for your work photography. Wouldn’t it be handy to tell the terrier to leave your work camera alone?
Well you can!
Image Capture is a great little utility that for some reason never seems to get much attention. We’ve written about it before on Apple Life, in particular its ability to do wifi scanning.
So onto controlling your USB camera devices.
Follow these steps:-
- Plug in your iPhone to your mac
- Close iPhoto
- Go to your applications folder and start Image Capture
- When Image Capture opens click on your iPhone in the ‘devices’ section
Figure 1
Then in the bottom left of the screen you will see some options like those in Figure 1.
From here, choose from the drop down menu the application that you would like to start when your iPhone starts, or alternatively “No application” if you would like to simply plug it in with nothing starting.
Figure 2
See Figure 2 for the list of options available to you, note you won’t have things like Aperture if you don’t actually have that installed on your machine.
This process will work for all of your USB camera devices, OSX will remember which one to open or none at all for each device you show it.
Praseela Feltenstein on 
James Wingo on 