Photos App Redux

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Today’s Question: After reading your 8/26 newsletter I decided to trash my Photos app. I got this message: “’Photos.app’ can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by OS X.”

Tim’s Quick Answer: The Apple Photos app indeed can no longer be removed through the normal process in Mac OS X. Fortunately, several readers shared a solution for disabling the auto-launch feature of Photos using a command that can be issue in the Terminal application.

More Detail: More than a few readers wrote in response to Friday’s edition of the Ask Tim Grey eNewsletter to let me know that it is no longer possible to uninstall the Photos app through the normal process in Mac OS X. Fortunately, a few readers provided a solution that I have tested and found to work perfectly.

If you’d like to disable the auto-launch feature of Apple Photos, you’ll first need to launch the Terminal application. This application can be found in the Utilities folder, which can be found within the Applications folder.

Once you’ve launched the Terminal application, enter this command and press Return on the keyboard:

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

If you later decide you would like to re-enable the auto-launch feature for Photos, simply enter this command into the Terminal application:

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.ImageCapture disableHotPlug -bool NO

My apologies to those who were confused by Friday’s answer, and big thanks to those who provided information about the solution.