Comment 35 for bug 555408

I just found a workaround:

Plugging in my camera stops gphoto2 as well as shotwell from triggering this behaviour. Well, this is where it gets odd for me. Anyway, this is not a practicable workaround, since battery life is limited.

By the way, I just updated libusb and gphoto just before trying this:
libgphoto2-2 2.4.8-0ubuntu2
libgphoto2-port0 2.4.8-0ubuntu2
libusb-0.1-4 2:0.1.12-15ubuntu2
libusb-1.0-0 2:1.0.8-2
libusb-dev 2:0.1.12-14ubuntu0.2

Hope it helps and thanks for looking into this.