Disable Apple Photos Auto Launch

The Mac Photos App is great and certainly an improvement over it’s predecessor iPhoto. However, it’s almost always too eager to pop up whenever it detects an iOS device being plugged in. Certainly, when we’re setting up and managing hundreds of iPads for schools or at our events, having to manually close down Photos per iPad plugged in gets very dull indeed.

However, salvation is here in the form of the following command. Simply copy and paste the following into Terminal: (Please note this should all go on one line!)

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool YES

Boom! Photos be gone!

To restore the auto launch, simply replace YES with NO in the command above.