I’ve been annoyed for sometime that every time I mount a CF card to copy files over, Canon’s CameraWindow launches and asks if I want to download the card.  I have tried turning it off several times, and could never find a way.  Tonight I finally got mad enough I decided to turn it off even if it meant reformatting my hard drive.  I assumed when installing it Canon was loading some startup item, but couldn’t find anything in the user preferences.   After about 20 minutes I ventured out on the internet with Google (again), when I finally discovered the problem from an internet post.

Mac OS X has built in photo management software ... every Mac comes with iPhoto which is actually a pretty robust application.  The OS even has RAW processing capabilities built in.  When inserting a CF card a built in application called Image Capture activates.  Normally this program is set to launch iPhoto and supports importing the images there.  In iPhoto you can disable this action.  If you launch Image Capture, you can also indicate some other program to launch in place of iPhoto (such as Photoshop or Lightroom).

Apparently Canon in all their wisdom has decided to modify Image Capture and sets it to launch Camera Window when you insert a CF card ... but there is no option in Camera Window to disable this action.  So you don’t know how they are doing it, or what to do to disable it ... it just happens, and the solution doesn’t even involve a basic OS setting or Canon software.

So the solution was rather simple ... once I discovered the problem (which I would have never done on my own.)  Launch Image Capture (not Camera Window), go to the preferences, and reset this to do what you want ... in my case do nothing.

Annoying to say the least.  No application should make a modification like this without asking, and without providing an easy and obvious method to change it back.