Apple Photos - How to Stop Autolaunch

One of my hobbies is photography. I love taking tons of photos and over the years I have developed a workflow involving Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom. I used iPhoto and more recently the new Apple Photos, but not as my main go-to application. Therefore I was quite annoyed when each and every time I plugged in my iPhone or SD card Apple Photos would open. Here's how to shut that off. 

Open up Photos and plug in your SD Card or iDevice. Go to the "Import" tab and look at the upper left corner of the window. 

All you need to do is uncheck the "Open Photos for this device" box and Photos will not autolaunch when you plug in your device. 

The somewhat annoying part is that you will need to do this for each and every device you plug in. But once you have plugged them in and unchecked the box all should be well and Photos won't autolaunch.

BONUS Section

People tend to forget applications they haven't used for a while (or in some cases never even knew existed). Image Capture is one of those applications. 

Image Capture has been around a long time and is installed by default in the Applications folder.  You can use Image Capture to do all sorts of things including using a scanner, sorting your photos, quick emails or even make a contact sheet. You can also set what you want to happen when you plug in a SD Card or idevice. 

Find Image Capture in your applications folder and open it up. Once open look in the lower left corner of the window. You will see almost the same import configuration options as you see in Photos.

If you don't see the import pull down menu (shown in the red circle above) hit the very small arrow box in the lower left corner. That symbol is Apple's universal icon for "There's more stuff here if you hit me!" In this case it toggles the import view on and off. Once open use the pull down menu to set the application or no application to autolaunch. 

Using Image Capture also allows you to set the import location or what to do with the photos on import. Just use the "Import To" pull down menu at the bottom center of the window.

As you can see there are a lot of cool options, even build a web page! How easy is that.  

If you are a photographer and take even a modest amount of photos, getting rid of small annoyances, saving time and streamlining your work can really pay off. These tips may not make you a better photographer but they definitely help your workflow.

Using Photo Stream to Save All Those iPhone Photos

One of the things my family loves to do is take a lot of photos. Now that we all have iPhones we take even more photos than ever! The biggest issue with all those photos is making sure they are safely backed up. You never know, you may lose your phone or your IT spouse may "helpfully" delete them off your phone to save some space. The Readers Digest version is this: In order to permanently save your iPhone photos you need to download them to your computer. To do that I use Photo Stream. 

To use Photo Stream you need an iCloud account and an Apple Device (iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch). There are a lot of benefits to enabling Photo Stream but there are also limitations. I'll go over those in a second. 

To set up Photo Stream first make sure you have an iCloud account then go to “Settings" and "iCloud" then choose “Photos” and enable “My Photo Stream"

Once you have PhotoStream enabled all photos you take are automatically uploaded to your iCloud account. Here's my list of Photo Stream basics that everyone needs to understand.

• Photos uploaded to Photo Stream do not count against your iCloud storage. so your basic 5GB iCloud isn’t impacted by the number of photos you take. 

• By design, Photo Stream only keeps the last 1000 photos in a rolling album. If you are on a trip and take a LOT of photos only the last 1000 are kept. If you take 1001 photos then the first one you took will be deleted out of the album.

• Photo Stream photos are saved on the Apple iCloud server for 30 days from the date you added them to Photo Stream. After that they are DELETED!

• If you shoot in burst mode only the final composite image will be uploaded to Photo Stream.

• New photos are automatically uploaded to your Photo Stream when you leave the Camera app and are connect to WiFi. They won't be uploaded over cellular connections.

• If you delete a photo from your camera roll it won't necessarily be deleted from the cloud if it's already been uploaded to Photo Stream. This can cause some embarrassing moments if your AppleTV is set to display your photo stream as a screen saver. (please don't ask how I know this!)

• If you sign out of iCloud or turn off Photo Stream all photos are removed from that device. Other devices aren't affected. 

As I said above, if you want to save your photos permanently you will need to download them to your computer. The easiest way to do that is use Aperture or iPhoto. Since it comes free with every Mac I use iPhoto.

In the iPhoto Preferences there is a setting under iCloud to make sure the photos are downloaded. 

Once that is done, all your photos will be downloaded to your iPhoto library and appear in Photo Stream Events organized by month. Even if your photos are more than 30 days old and no longer in iCloud they will be saved.

Now that you have all your great photos on your Mac just make sure your backup software is backing up your iPhoto library. You never know when your HD might fail!