as soon as I load a CD in tray, an icon pops up in desktop; it also has an "Eject..." command that unmount and ejects CD. I have not found a way to solve this inconvenience and from now on I have worked solely under Gnome. :|
I haven't worked with KDE but I am pretty sure that if you fire up the analog of gconf-editor for KDE there has to be an option somewhere just like gconf has for 'magicdev' to automount and/or autorun a CD once inserted. This can be turned on and off. For example I have it off because it might interfere with CD or DVD writting by claiming access on the device while it is busy.
Unfortunately, this does nothing to address the O.P.'s question about photo CDs. However, I thought I'd share this fix for the BUG in KDE that assumes any disk inserted needs playing. This is my custom /usr/bin/autorun after renaming the original:
[rj@mavis FC3]$ cat /usr/bin/autorun
#!/bin/bash
# This file does nothing but replace the original /usr/bin/autorun
# file (renamed to WAS_autorun) to hopefully stop KDE from bitching
# and moaning and having a walleyed fit over the file not being
# found. To restore to normal, with all the problems attendant with
# some idiotic juke box program taking control of the CDROMs, simply:
# mv /usr/bin/WAS_autorun /usr/bin/autorun
