From a comment on a Lifehacker article:

Also, if you open the Image Capture app, at the bottom left there’s a collapsible menu that allows you to select what application automatically opens whenever any media is mounted.

Yes, please, thank you. I had a real rough ride with Photos, and eventually gave up. I'm not sure why Apple keeps thinking a single "file" with all your pictures is a better paradigm than a real file system. And they can't write a good photo management tool to save their lives. I ran into import stalls, app freezes, and the inability to delete (or even cancel deleting) the giant photo file until I turned off the iMac, rebooted, and used rm -rf *. That shouldn't be necessary. NOTE: Don't type that command in your terminal unless you darn well know what you're doing.

Photos in OS X 10.9 stinks. iPhoto tried hard, but stunk. That's it. I'm done. Again. I hope.

So I'm back to using Image Capture, which I love, with Picasa, which I also have learned to love. Picasa is quick and defensive, sitting politely on top of your file system without really screwing with it at all. It's an easy paradigm, and it updates quickly when you use the Finder to move your files around instead of its own interface. Because, you know, files.

The only problem? Photos keeps trying to open when I attach an iOS device.

Beautiful. Not even a button for "create a new library", which I believe iPhotos had. I'm growing increasingly confident Apple's testing doesn't extend to edge cases and what I'll call "exploratory misuse". If you don't follow their oxymoronically private Flowchart of Proper Apple Software Usage, too bad. Why isn't there a "make new library" button? Well, because nobody ever needs to do that. Why won't the Photos library delete in 3 hours? Well, because we all know the first rule of Photos Club: Nobody deletes Photos Club. (rm -rf was much faster, in case you're wondering.)

This Image Capture trick does the trick (though you have to do it for each source) and makes me like Image Capture more. Simpler is often better.

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