Transcription
So I've been doing a lot of advanced shortcuts here on the channel recently with things using ChatGPT 4.0, lots of if statements, and location-based automations. But I thought it would be good to go back to the basics, kind of give you the main building blocks I use in a lot of my shortcuts. This way, you can build shortcuts and automations that are tailored to you.
So, in this video, I'm going to give you 15 of the most popular actions that I use on a regular basis and maybe give you some ideas for shortcuts that incorporate them. You can use the chapters here at the bottom of the video or in the description if you want to jump to a particular action.
So, I'm going to create a new shortcut, just a way of access to all the different actions. And the first one, this is something I use in a lot of automations, is current location. You'll see when you search for location, there's a bunch of options here, but I'm going to select to get current location.
Now, at first, this action doesn't look like it's doing very much. There's a precision option where you can choose how big the radius around your current location to get. But I'm going to pair this with a second action, one that I use often just to see what I'm getting from these shortcut results. And for that, I'm going to search for Quick Look. Quickly here. And Quick Look will basically show you the current output of the shortcut or whatever the previous step was.
So when I run this shortcut, you'll see it's actually getting my latitude. But with a lot of actions, you can actually choose the kind of information you're going to receive from your current location or various other data. So where it says "Show" and then the action, which was selected here, I'm going to tap that and you'll see in this menu that comes up from the bottom. These are all the different bits of information you can get from current location. It could be street, address, city, state, even things like label if you have that address labeled in your contacts, region, and more. Let's choose something just like city. And we'll incorporate this in a shortcut in a moment.
Now when I run it, you'll see that it's going to get my current city, which is the Noda Sasa. Yes, it is a mouthful. So these two actions I use very often, especially with a lot of the automations I've created on the channel: Get Current Location and then Quick Look to preview what's going to happen. I deleted the Quick Look action.
And now let's talk about the if statement. This is something that is a little more advanced but makes automations and shortcuts really useful. If I just search for the word "if," you'll see under the scripting heading that the simple action "if" right here. I can tap that, and now I get an "if" or "otherwise." I know this might seem a little intimidating at first, but all this action is telling you is if my current location or whatever other data we put at the beginning, if it matches "x," then do whatever actions I put right here. Otherwise, do some good stuff.
Now you'll see when you add an if statement or other actions that could take advantage of the current location, you'll see it automatically populates right there. Now I'm going to tap the current location again and remember we have all these options of different things to choose from, and I'm going to select city. Now when I choose a different bit of information, you'll see there's kind of a blanked-out area right here. When I tap that, I have options in my if statement. So if city is, or is not, or has any value, or contains. I typically use "contains," especially if I'm going to use a street address and I'm trying to create an automation that's based on when I'm home. I'll do "contains" my street address and then choose "street address" in the if statement. But let's do something a little more precise. We'll say "if city is," and now we can type a variable or any word, and we'll put my current city.
Now when this shortcut runs, if my device and me are in this city, these actions will happen, or something else can happen. So let's search for another action here. This is one that you might find useful in different automations, but low power mode can actually be enabled directly from an action. You'll see here, "Set Low Power Mode" is an action. I'm going to tap and hold that with my finger. I'm going to keep my finger on the screen and now I can drag that under the if statement. So now when this shortcut runs, if my current location is in the Noda Sasa, turn low power mode on. Otherwise, do nothing.
So if I run this and I've done everything correctly, because I'm currently in this city, low power mode should enable. Let's play the shortcut and see what happens. And sure enough, you'll see the battery icon went into low power mode. Let's turn low power mode back off for a second. And now if I put this action in the "otherwise," the shortcut is going to check, "Is my city Thonoda Sasa?" If so, well, I haven't put anything under there, so it shouldn't do anything. But if I'm not in my city, then enable low power mode.
So if I play this now, because I am currently in that city, it did not enable low power mode. It's an easy way to create an automation, whether it's low power mode, texting someone, whatever you'd like, based on current location, which can be customized via the city. If you want to do something like when you're home, I'll typically choose "street" and do my street address. And you have lots of options there.
And so right there are three big actions: Get Current Location, Quick Look to check what it's returning, and an if statement for automation. Now, I'm going to delete these actions by tapping the X. And let's look at something else I use pretty often, which is Choose From Menu.
Box again, choose. And you'll see you have "Choose From Menu" and "Choose From List." We're going to go over that second one in a moment, but I'm going to select "Choose From Menu." Choose From Menu is an easy way to have multiple choices within a single shortcut. For instance, on my home screen for my iPhone, this little symbol down here is actually a shortcut with a custom icon that is a "Choose From Menu" shortcut. When I tap it, I have a bunch of menu options, which is basically all the different social media networks plus Bear notes because I use that pretty often. And I can just choose to jump to one of those social networks easily. I find that this looks better than a folder in the dock. I can do a custom icon, then I can adjust that menu however I would like.
So when we add a "Choose From Menu" action, this can do lots of things. Maybe you want a manual way to toggle "Silence Unknown Callers." So I'm going to make two menu options here: one called "Enable" and one called "Disable." And when you have a menu, you can also choose to write a prompt. This lets you know what it is you're choosing. I'm going to put the name of that action right there. You'll see that "Enable" is a menu option where I can put other shortcut actions, and "Disable."
Let's search for that "Silence Unknown Callers" action. You'll see it right here, and I'll tap it to add that right here to the shortcut. I'll move that action under "Enable." And now when this runs, I'll see the menu. And if I tap "Enable," it will turn "Silence Unknown Callers" on. Now for some actions like this, rather than on or off, you can also choose "toggle." So if I tap here where it says "turn," I can make it "toggle." But sometimes, depending on the current state, I actually prefer to kind of precisely program whether I want it on or off.
Now, I need to get one more of these actions to put it on the "Disable" section. But rather than search again for it, I can actually tap on the little symbol next to the shortcut actions, and you'll see you have several options. You can "Show Info." That'll tell you a little bit about what the action does. You can add it to your favorites, and you can also duplicate or copy. The copy and paste is helpful if you need to put it far away in the shortcut. If it's really long, it's a duplicate option.
Now, I have another version of that action. I can drag it under the "Disable" section, and I'll make this "off." You see, I just tap that text right there. Now, when I run this shortcut, I'll see a menu option slide in at the top. I can enable or disable, and that's all it needs to do. And I can put this shortcut on my home page in my Today View. Let me change the title, color, and icon. This way it looks a little nicer.
Now, if I wanted to add this to my home screen, I can just tap the title of the shortcut here at the top. Choose "Add to Home Screen." You actually have the option to upload an image for this or just use the icon and title you already set. And now here it is on my home page. I can tap it. I see the menu come up, and we can enable it. So now I won't get calls from unknown callers, or I can tap it again and disable it quickly. "Choose From Menu" is really powerful, especially if you want to combine multiple shortcuts or actions in one and just choose from a menu to decide which way it goes. I'll actually do the shortcut there, and I'll put the link in the video description if you'd like a quick toggle for "Silence Unknown Callers."
Now let's create a new shortcut, and for this, we're going to start with an RSS feed. So if I search again in my actions, I'll just put "RSS." You'll see "Get Items from RSS Feed" is an option. If I tap that, it'll do the Apple Newsroom by default, but you can also put the RSS feed from your favorite website right there. Now I can choose how many items to get from this RSS feed. I'm going to make that a little less. We'll say five. And this action by itself isn't going to do a whole lot, but we can do "Choose From List." And I'll show you what that looks like in a moment. You'll see it's actually suggested right here, or I can search in the box again and I'll do "Choose From List."
Now when I run this shortcut, it's going to get the last five items from that RSS feed, present me with a list, and allow me to select one or multiple. If I expand the "Choose From List" menu, you'll see I can also toggle "Select Multiple" on, and then I can have multiple articles go to the next step, and I'll show you what we can do with this in a moment. I'm going to uncheck though, because I just want to select one article. And when you run shortcuts that have to pull things from the web, you'll see this kind of notice the very first time you're running it, and then you won't see that every time after. But now I have a list here of the last five items from the Apple Newsroom RSS feed.
Now I can actually select one, and it would pass that item to the next step. I haven't added any more steps here, so that's all it did, but that's how you use the "Choose From List" action. Now let's do something else. One action I use a lot is the "Get URL." I'm going to choose "Get URLs from Input" here, tap and hold on that action, move it below the "Choose From" action, and now it's going to get the URL of whatever the article I choose from the RSS feed. Let's add that "Quick Look" one more time so we can see what we're getting as a result.
And now when I run this shortcut, I'll choose the latest item, and that right there is the URL from that RSS item. This can be helpful to get a bunch of URLs quickly from a website, and then you can format those URLs later for my podcast show notes, automations, and formatting them for my podcast hosts. Now after that "Get URLs" action, I'm going to add one more, which is a "Get Images" action. This becomes really powerful if you're wanting to pull images from articles or websites that you visit often. So I'm going to choose "Get Images from Input," and let's add that "Quick Look" item at the bottom.
And now when I run this shortcut, I can choose any of the articles. We'll do the "Apple Intelligence" one, and it's going to find whatever images are on that webpage, show it to me in Quick Look. I can swipe through or also just tap the little hamburger menu there and quickly jump to different images and see if there's any that I want to save. And you'll see here I have a share sheet if I want to save this image to my camera roll, share to someone, or run more shortcuts on it. I'll leave this shortcut as is as well if you want that link in the description and you want to play around with different RSS feeds or different actions for that kind of automation.
Now let's create a new shortcut, and there's a powerful part of shortcuts which is that it can live in the share sheet anywhere on your device. Now to get a shortcut to appear there, we actually have to tap the "i" icon here at the bottom middle. And here you'll see the "Show in Share Sheet" action. You'll also see other actions like "Add to Home Screen," which you can also access from the title, "Show on Apple Watch," "Pin in Menu Bar" if you're on Mac OS, and a couple of other things.
If we toggle on "Show in Share Sheet" and then hit "Done," now you'll see the shortcut starts with this kind of menu. And here you can tell it to receive certain things. You can have it receive anything and everything like images, files, text, but I like to be specific on this. This way, I don't see the shortcut showing up and cluttering up that menu all the time. So let's clear this. Let me just do it for URLs, like when we're browsing Safari. So I'll just leave it as URLs and then hit "Done."
Now you can also have a secondary part of this share sheet option, which is to get your clipboard or ask for something if nothing is input from the share sheet. For a lot of shortcuts, I do "Get Clipboard." This way, I can run it whether I copied something or I'm in the share sheet. But for right now, let's just leave "Stop and Respond if Nothing is Received" from that share sheet.
Now let's add one of the actions we just used, which is "Get Images." There's our "Get Images from Input," and guess what? Let's add our "Quick Look" action at the bottom of that. So now when we're looking at a web page, maybe we want to quickly see all the images of it, have them in Quick Look, and then use the share sheet, we can do it all right here. Let's title this "Get Web Images" and we'll hit "Done." I'll put a link to this shortcut down in the description as well.
Now let's go to a website. I'm going to hit the share sheet here at the bottom. I'll slide this up, and you'll see I have many shortcut options down here. The new one we just created called "Get Web Images" is right here. You'll see this permission dialog again on any websites that is running for the first time. I'll click "Always Allow," and this might take a few minutes because there's lots of images on this page. And if you have a 15 Pro or 14 Pro or regular 15, you can kind of see the shortcut running in the Dynamic Island up there.
Alright, I had to go to a different page because there was too many images it was trying to get. But here on my bio page, you see it pulled that picture. I can go to the hamburger menu, see if there's any other images it pulled. And of course, I can use the share sheet here to save it or send it to someone else.
Let's go back and talk about clipboard actions. I'll create a new shortcut. And here, if you search for "clipboard" in the little actions menu, you'll see "Copy to Clipboard" and "Get Clipboard." These are really powerful tools. So I'm going to start with a "Get Clipboard" action. Now let's say I'm going to select a bunch of text. There's a lot of text formatting tools in shortcuts as well. I'm going to search for "HTML" and you'll see there's options to reformat it, like "Make HTML from Rich Text" or "Make Rich Text from HTML." Let's select that option. So it's going to get the clipboard, make rich text from the clipboard, and then let's do a "Quick Look" to see the result. Simple three-step shortcut.
Now let me go to one of my notes where I have a bunch of HTML. I just used a shortcut to open the Bear app. Here's my past show notes from Primary Technology. You should definitely follow my tech podcast. Links are in the video description. And I'm going to select all this text, which is a lot of HTML. And now I can just tap "Copy." Now that HTML code is on my clipboard of the device. I'll go back to my shortcut, click "Play," and it's going to reformat. And this has been a little broken in shortcuts for this Quick Look, but don't worry because when I hit "Done," you'll actually see that rich text here in the preview. Expand it, and now I have rich text with those URLs and links all nicely formatted, and I can copy this and put it in my podcast host because it doesn't support HTML. But this is a great way to format text from markdown to rich text, HTML back and forth. And instead of the "Quick Look" action, if you want, I could have added "Copy to Clipboard," and now I can format it quickly, copy it back to the clipboard, and then paste it even without going into shortcuts. I can make this a share sheet option, and that share sheet is available whenever you have text selected. I can put this on the or a menu there and have this be easy access. Link to this shortcut down in the description as well.
Alright, another useful action that I've done in several automations is getting and formatting the current date. Now I'm gonna search for "date," and you'll see just getting the current date is an option there, but I like starting with "Format Date." The reason why is you can actually just choose to format today's date. When I tap in the little blank spot next to the word "Format," I can slide over on this menu above the keyboard and just choose "Current Date" right there. Then you'll see this little menu pop up, and I can format the date however I would like. Sometimes the format date is a little funny. I'm actually going to expand it here, and you'll see another formatting option. I'm going to choose "Date Format: Medium," "Time Format: None," collapse that. Then guess what? We're going to add another "Quick Look" action to see what we're getting.
And now you'll see the formatted date is right there. Now you can use this in automations and if statements, like if the date is today or tomorrow. And there's another really powerful action. I'm going to tap and hold that action and then drag it between the "Format Date" and the "Quick Look" action. Then from here, you can choose to add seconds, hours, minutes, or even days. I'm going to add one day to that formatted date, and then that Quick Look, you see, automatically adjusted to the action that I put in between. When I play this, you'll see now it's formatting to tomorrow's date. You see that at the time again? So sometimes you kind of have to flop these around. So I'm going to add one day to, tap that blank space, and you'll see also if you swipe on this little menu, "Current Date" is an option. So I'm going to add one date to the current date, and then I'm going to format. I'm going to clear this action, tap the blank space, choose "Select Variable," and choose the "Adjusted Date." Expand this little menu here. Again, "Date Format," we want "Medium," "Time Format: None." It kept those settings, and I want to make sure the Quick Look is getting that formatted date. So I'm going to select that variable, hit [inaudible] clear, tap the "Show" again, and let's choose "Formatted Date."
Now this should format it to be tomorrow's date, which should be June 15th with no time and the medium length format. Let's run it. And there we have adjusted date. This is helpful if you're formatting things like podcast show notes, like let's say you're doing a daily show and you want the podcast show notes to say tomorrow and not today. Well, you can work in this "Adjust Date" and then "Format Date" to be exactly what you want. You can also add if statements, like if it's free. You can also add if statements, like if it's free.
All right, two more quick actions that I'll show you. And this is to "Get Photo" or "Get File." So if I simply search for "Photos," you'll see that the app pops up right here. You'll see the app pops up right here. And I can tap that, and you'll see all the actions available to you that are related to photos. Now you see you have "Find Photos," "Get Photos." If you just want to get the last one imported or get the latest screenshots specifically, those are all built-in actions. Let's choose "Select Photos." From that, I can expand the menu. I can choose whether or not I want to select multiple, but I'm just going to leave it as single. And let's just see what that action does.
When I play this shortcut, you'll see my photo library slides up. I can select a single photo. And now I can do things to that photo after this action. Let's say I want to crop photos quickly. Well, "Crop" is actually an action that's also built into shortcuts. Let's choose "Crop Image." And I can expand the "Crop Image" to be different sizes. I can choose 500 by 500 pixels. And you can even choose what direction to crop the image. So now, let's run this shortcut. I'll choose this picture here. And you'll see it actually cropped that image into a 500 by 500 square. And again, I can choose, you know, which direction I want it to crop. Let's do top left and see what that does. And you can see it cropped it very differently. You can also get very specific, even putting in coordinates for a custom cropping in whichever direction you would like.
In addition to the photos, you can also get photos. So if I search for "Files" down here in the actions menu, I'll tap the "Files" app. You see lots of options here. Let's choose "Select File." Now when I run this, it'll bring up the file picker. I can choose any of the files in iCloud Drive or Dropbox if I have that integrated, and then do something with that file. Or maybe there's a file that you regularly share with people all the time and you want to do a shortcut so you don't have to keep navigating to that file each time you want to send it. Well, let's look again at our "Files" actions. I'm going to choose this action which simply says "File." For this, I can now tap in that blank spot. I'll choose the "Primary Technology Artwork" as the file, and now this shortcut is always going to start with that one file and automatically put the path for me so I don't have to think about it. And let's add a "Quick Look" action, and we can see that it's going to get that image file every time I run this shortcut.
Now let's say this is like your sponsor media kit or another document you send often. Maybe you're sending your resume a lot. Well, now I'll show you the final action for the video, and that is "Share." We can just simply search for "Share" and add the "Share" option there, and it's going to share that file that we programmed at the beginning of the shortcut. I can hit "Play," and now it brings up the share sheet, and then I can text this image, or if it's a PDF, I can email it to someone quickly every time. So I don't have to keep digging back in the Files app or referring to somewhere else on my phone. I can just run this shortcut and send that chosen file every time to someone different.
So those are some of my most used shortcuts, building blocks, and actions that hopefully you can take and start building shortcuts and automations on your own. But before you go, subscribe to the channel right here and hit that like button. And as you might know, I have lots of shortcuts videos, including some advanced shortcuts, like with ChatGPT. I'll put one of those videos right up here, but I also have an entire playlist of shortcuts videos, including shortcuts for battery life, AirPods, and more. So you can check out that playlist right here. And some of those videos are pretty popular. I think people have found them useful. And so I love making them.
If you have shortcuts requests, leave comments on this video. I plan to do another shortcuts request video soon. I've done a lot of those videos, and they're fun. I'd like to know the kind of shortcuts that are useful to you, and I can make them in the next video. So drop those comments below, hit the bell icon too while you're here, and then thank you for watching.