removable devices on many desktop systems is facilitated by the Thunar file manager (and Thunar volume manager) with the GVFS virtual filesystem. If Thunar is running, then any removable devices plugged in are automounted. And that is the snag: Thunar must be running in order for the device to be made available to other applications (unless they are capable of mounting the device themselves). For users of stacking window managers (mouse driven GUI desktops) this is largely a non-issue as Thunar or a similarly equipped file manager is likely the most common application launched to access the media.
Enter udiskie, a storage device manager for handling removable media. It can be invoked within the .xinitrc or autostart script as..
udiskie --use-udisks2
The volume will be automounted on “/run/media/$USER/{partition label}” and be available to any application. When done accessing the device, you can simply remove the media to automatically unmount it.
Easy peasy.