Yo Apple, Photos.app is really great and everything, but those of us who use third-party photo production software for ingestion and processing don’t want to see it EVERY TIME WE PLUG A MEMORY CARD INTO OUR MAC. (We don’t want to see it when we connect our iPhone, either. We only do that when Facebook Too Much Very Important Work has killed our phone battery.)

A user-friendly toggle to disable this for all devices would be super. Perhaps under System Preferences > CDs and DVDs?

Meanwhile, fellow photographers, here’s a terminal command that will safely disable the automatic opening of Photos.app when you least expect it. Copy and paste everything after the $ into Terminal.app and press Return:

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

Unlike some of the other workarounds on the Internet, this one works even when you regularly re-format your memory cards (as most of us do). And it doesn’t require you to delete Photos.app, which might potentially break something somehow. No reboot required, either.

Update (27-Nov-15): If, for some reason, you want to reverse this change and return to OS X’s default behaviour, here’s the command to run:

$ defaults -currentHost delete com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug