Automatically mount external drive when running an app?

Tech Support
1

Hi all,

I use the ‘Mountain’ app to mount my external SSD drive from the menubar when I need to use it.

Is it possible to cut out this step so that a drive will mount when I run the app that needs the external drive?

I would like to click on the ‘Photos’ app, which uses my external SSD drive for my photo library and if the drive is not mounted then prompt it to?

Alternatively, is there any real reason not to keep this drive mounted at all times anyway…in regards to lifespan?

Thanks!

2

You should be able to accomplish this with Keyboard Maestro. A KM macro can be triggered by an app launching.

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3

Do we know any KM alternatives as no other real need to purchase?

4

Keyboard Maestro is the only app I know of that can do this, but it’s not the way I’d do it.

If you launch the app and the drive isn’t mounted, Photos won’t see the drive immediately and will probably complain or create a new photoslibrary on your internal drive.

Instead I’d do it the other way: have mounting the drive trigger the Photos.app to launch.

You could do that with launchd or keyboard Maestro.

Keyboard Maestro is a worthy investment for any Mac power user. There are dozens of things you can find to do with it once you have.

You could also use it to unmount the drive when Photos quits.

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5

How about an AppleScript that mounts the drive then launches Photos? Put it in an Automator app and you’re good to go.

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6

Using Mountain is a 2-second step of clicking on the menubar and selecting an unmounted volume. I’d just continue to do it manually.

And no, there’s no reason not to always have it connected to a desktop machine.

(For backup drives it’s a different story for me; I prefer to disconnect at least one set of backup drives to prevent electrical spikes - something that happened once and destroyed my connected drives during a blackout.)

7

An app called Automounter might do it. I use it to automount my Synology when I’m home. Not sure if it has app triggers or not.

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8

Here’s a link to Automounter

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9

Automounter looks very nice.

I have been using Keyboard Maestro to automatically mount my Synology volumes when my Macbook Pro is connected to my wireless LAN (= when I am at home). It works like a charme.

Gabe Weatherhead published an awesome blog post back in 2012. It still works to this day:

http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/03/keep-a-drive-mounted-with-keyboard-maestro.html

So, if somebody owns Keyboard Maestro, it can be used to do some mounting magic using automation.

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