MacOS Shortcuts, Quick Actions
Are you tired of constantly searching for your favorite shortcuts buried deep in your Shortcuts library? Do you wish there was a simpler way to access them with just a few clicks? Well, you’re in luck! In this blog post, we’ll be discussing two easy ways to make your shortcuts easily accessible from anywhere on your Mac.
So, let’s dive in and make your Shortcuts life a little bit easier!
Recap
In the previous post we created a Shortcut to help to automate resizing multiple images at the same time, leaving us with a Shortcut like below
Menu Bar
To make this Shortcut easily accessible you can add the Shortcut to the menu bar. Select the “ShortCut details” button in the top right menu of the right panel and tick “Pin in Menu Bar”
And that’s it, super easy. In the menu bar you should not see the Shortcut icon, select that and you can run your ShortCut from there
Quick Actions
As the Shortcut we created centred around files, we can adjust the Shortcut to be actioned in the Finder window directly on selected files.
Similar to the Menu Bar we can also set the Shortcut as a Quick Action for Finder. This time in the “ShortCut details” area, select “Use as Quick Action” and select “Finder”.
But also notice that selecting that option amended our script and added a receiver, see below…
This new part of the script will take its input from the Quick Actions, but if there is no input it will continue to run the script you have already created.
Rather than the script just continuing, we can amend that instead to select a file. Tap “Continue” and select “Ask for”, then amend the type to Files.
Next we can change Receive “Any” to “Files”. Rather than the script just continuing, we can amend that instead to select a file. Tap “Continue” and select “Ask for”, then amend the type to Files.
Next select “show more” to select multiple files.
Underneath “Receive” we also have “Select File”, but as “Receive” can now also select Files there is no longer a need for that task, so we can remove that part of the script. Our Shortcut now looks like…
Ok, almost there. As we removed the previous “Select Files”, our script no longer has a concept of “File”, which is why File is now red in “Repeat with each item in”. We’ll need to fix this up by changing that to “Shotcut input”. However you’ll notice that the interface will not allow you to change that value.
The only way I’ve managed to fix up the File warning so far (please add a comment if you find a better way), is to add in a new “Repeat” script and drag it underneath the “Receive” script, like so…
If you now select the blue “items”, you can now select “Shortcut Input”. You will now need to fix up the rest of the script by simply dragging and dropping from the “if” script from the broken “Repeat” to our new “Repeat”. You should then end up with something like…
One quick change to “Save”. For my case I’d like all resizes images to be saved to the Desktop and override any file that already exists.
And that’s it we are done. Now in Finder select a few files you would like to resize, open the menu and select “Quick Actions” and you should see your Shorcut. Selecting that Shortcut will action the script and save all resized images to your Desktop.
Just as a final check, try to run your Shortcut via the menu bar again. This will cause the script to use “if there’s no input”, just to make sure that part of the script is working as desired.
I hope these posts get you up and running with Shortcuts easily.
To see more of whats possible with Shortcuts here’s a handy list of Shortcuts with different features that can give you some ideas for your own automations.
Enjoy.
If this has inspired you to learn more you might find the links below useful.
Create macOS Shortcut to amend multiple files at the same time
