Prevent iPhoto or Aperture from opening when you connect your iPhone
This tip will only work on OS X.
Sam wrote a post at 37signals’ blog about the same thing (Tip: Prevent iPhoto from opening when you plug in your iPhone), but it didn’t quite apply to my situation. Sam’s tip will work fine if you have your camera nearby -which I don’t. Besides, I have a couple of cameras so I would anyway have to make changes to the script in order to make it work. A more simpler way to make this work is to approach it from a different angle.
I am going to present to you a script that only requires that you know the name of your iPhone. If you have already read Sam’s article you can skip to step 2 of this article to get the script.
1. Get the name of your iPhone
An easy way is to connect your iPhone, open iTunes (if it doesn’t automatically) and look at the list to the left. There it is!
2. Write the script
Open up up AppleScript Editor (on Snow Leopard, it’s inside the Applications > Utilities folder) and copy/paste this code:
on device_is_connected("iPhone name")
end device_is_connected
Change “iPhone name” to the name of your iPhone (I wrote “mandarinPhone”). As you can see, all it does is check if your phone is connected. Besides that, nothing.
3. Make the application
Save your script as an Application by clicking File > Save as …, and under File Format choose Application. I like to store applications like this under the Utilities folder. These are applications that I don’t ever have to run manually, so to prevent my root Applications folder from being cluttered with all kinds of stuff I don’t use I put it in the Utilities foldes. For this application I named it “iPhoneConnected”.
4. Open Image Capture
You’ll find it inside the Applications folder. Benjamin refers to the Image Capture application preferences as being a menu item. I suspect he was using an older version at the time he wrote the article. On Snow Leopard you do like this: If your iPhone is not already selected, select it by clicking on it. If the preferences don’t show up at the bottom of the list, click the button at the bottom. It will open up a preferences pane for the iPhone. Where it says “Connecting this iPhone opens:” click the drop down list and find your newly created application.
That’s it! Reconnect your iPhone and watch it do nothing. Lovely isn’t it? It sure is!
UPDATE: Benjamin Ragheb didn’t write the post at 37signals’ blog, but Sam did. Be sure to check out Benjamin’s comment below. He made a script which fetches the name of your iPhone for you -so you don’t have to. Nifty!
