Marc Köhlbrugge

While creating an Automator action for uploading screenshots to Flickr I came across the term PTP. After some research I learned PTP (which stands for Picture Transfer Protocol) is a protocol for connecting your Digital Photo Camera via USB.

Normally when you attach a camera via USB the camera will be recognized as a USB Mass Storage Device and your camera (or memory card if you want) will be mounted to your desktop. The problem with this is you have to manually unmount the USB Mass Storage Device in order to prevent the risk of data loss.

However, with PTP this problem is gone. When you set your camera to use PTP it will not be mounted on your desktop but will still be accessible by programs like iPhoto.

So if you reguarly connect and disconnect your camera try using PTP (if your camera supports it) and you won’t be nagged by those “USB Device was unsafely removed, blah blah” errors.

Let me know how it works out for you!

PS
I haven’t tried this on Windows (or Linux) but according to Wikipedia Windows should support it and I’m sure Linux does too perhaps with some extra software.