Stop Opening! How To Change The Default Applications [System]

Apple doesn't make it neccessarily easy to change the default application for different stuff (email app, photo app, etc.) Here's a quick guide telling you what's where when you want to change your default applications.

Email

This is probably the worst out of all of these. Instead of putting an option somewhere in System Preferences to change your default email client, you have use Mail.app. First, open up Mail.app from the applications folder. Then, setup an email account. Finally, go to the Mail preferences and under General there is the option to change your default email reader.



Inserting a Camera

I originally had it set so that when I inserted a camera, it opened iPhoto. Not any more though! It's too much of a slow down when I only want one picture. To change this behavior open up the Image Capture application in your Applications folder. Hit Cmd-, to open the preferences and change the option from there.

While you can do this in iPhoto, you get more options with Image Capture. (You can choose "Other...." in Image Capture, but not in iPhoto.)



Web Browser

This one is probably the easiest. You can either do it in FireFox, Safari, Camino, and some others.

For Safari:
Hit Cmd-, to open the Safari preferences.
Click on the General tab.
Change the first option to whichever one you want.


In FireFox:
Hit Cmd-, to go to the FireFox preferences.
Click on the Advanced tab.
Click on the General tab inside the Advanced tab.
Click on the button labeled "Check Now" in the lower right hand corner of the window.



Default IM Program

Like the others, you'll need to open up iChat to change this. After opening iChat.app, hit Cmd-, to go to the preferences, click on the General tab and change the first drop down menu to your desired Default IM Program.



Those are the only one's I can think of that need to be changed like this. If you can think of one please post about it in the comments. Also, you might want to check out one of the third part "Default Application" changers called RCDefaultApp. RCDefaultApp is a preference pane that lets you change seemingly every default application for pretty much anything.