Picture Me Frustrated

July 18, 2007 9:40 PM

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter . . . How About Stopping, Instead?

Somehow I came into possession of Adobe Photoshop Album Starter -- bundled with something else -- and I don't have much objection to it; in fact, it nicely sucked in and organized all my photos. Problem is, the thing starts every time I insert my USB thumb drive, at least if the drive has an image on it somewhere (haven't tried purging it of everything, but wouldn't be a long term solution anyway). So is there a way of preventing that, without uninstalling Album Starter, so that it does whatever it wants except initiating on insert of the drive? I have Googled and looked all around Adobe's site, or at least tried my best. Thanks in advance for any pointers, and sorry for such a boring question.

posted by Clyde Mnestra to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Maybe you unknowingly got the "Windows can perform the same action" dialog box and clicked Adobe's product and the"Always do the selected action" check box when you inserted the thumb drive?

Go to My Computer with the thumb drive in, right click the thumb drive, Properties, and the Autoplay tab. Select Pictures and choose "Take no action"
posted by daninnj at 9:54 PM on July 18, 2007

Thanks for the suggestion. I had tried that, but tried it again -- not only for pictures but also for video and mixed -- and tried first selecting "take no action" and, when that didn't work, selected "always prompt." Neither worked.

The only thing that happened was that on one occasion, after Adobe opened, I was also prompted to select the action I wanted; at that juncture I tried selecting "open folder" (approx.), which is what I really want to have happen, but it didn't keep.
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 10:06 PM on July 18, 2007

Look at the bottom of the first page in this document.
It tells you to click the photo downloader icon in the system tray (bottom right of your task bar) and click disable. This may be a right click. Experiment a bit.
posted by IronLizard at 11:22 PM on July 18, 2007

Some programs drop a hidden config file on the thumb drive. Windows Media Player did this to me; for some goddamn reason it is impossible to tell the thing that sometimes a thumb drive is just portable storage and not a media player. Deleting the hidden file allowed me to stop WMP from randomly accessing the drive every time it was plugged in, which messed with my ability to eject it without errors.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:26 AM on July 19, 2007

This is a windows setting. You can change it: right-click on the drive, select properties, then autoplay. You should be able to figure out the rest.
posted by Four Flavors at 9:40 PM on July 19, 2007

That was covered in the first answer, FF. This is an Adobe program in the startups that's doing it. Seriously. The answer is in the manual I linked to.
posted by IronLizard at 10:03 PM on July 19, 2007

Ah, my reading comprehension is poor tonight.

Tangentially related, you may want to look at the settings in TweakUI (power toy from Microsoft) it has the ability to edit what each of the handlers do. I don't think it'll fix your problem, but it's useful for other programs handlers that seem to take over.
posted by Four Flavors at 10:18 PM on July 19, 2007

Thanks for all the suggestions -- I think the Adobe-specific one is taking, and I'm embarrassed that I couldn't find that document myself.

FWIW, I had also tried the TweakUI approach before, which hadn't panned out either.
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 2:46 PM on July 23, 2007