Why doesn't ImageCapture let me specify a destination folder?

I saw this very same problem and was stymied by it for the longest time on my own Mac system. Like you, I tried deleting my preferences file for the program but still ended up with a startup view like this:

As you can see, there's just a blank space where I should be able to select a destination directory and there's a blank where I should be able to pick an Automatic Task. Not good.

The fix I stumbled across rather inadvertently, however! I've always dropped non-essential Mac programs into a subdirectory and as an experiment, I moved ImageCapture back to the main Applications directory and restarted it.

Without any other changes, suddenly it all worked perfectly:

That's more like it!

Try ensuring that your own copy of ImageCapture is in the Applications folder and I bet you'll have the program work properly!