Master Quick Actions

Make your Mac life even easier with the power of Actions

- CARRIE MARSHALL

REQUIRES

macOS 12 or later

YOU WILL LEARN

How to add useful Actions to Finder

IT WILL TAKE

15 minutes

macOS IS FULL of useful things, but it's not always obvious where they are. For example, one of the really cool features in Finder is tucked away in the Ctrl-click menu under Quick Actions. Here you'll find automations to turn photos into PDFs, to open PDFs in Markup mode and to change photos from one format to another, and you can also add your own.

Creating automations used to be the job of Automator, which was brilliant but pretty intimidating to newcomers. The Shortcuts app, introduced in macOS Monterey, is much friendlier - but, as we'll discover, it's still more than capable of doing some clever and useful things.

Quick Actions are a great way to automate everyday things. You can use one to automatically crop and resize your photos, for example. In this tutorial, we'll create one that automatically joins multiple images together. We're sure you'll have your own ideas, so get experimenting and let us know what you come up with.

HOW TO Create a Quick Action

1 Find in Finder

In Finder, Ctrl-click on any file and look for the Quick Actions option. Click on it to see a list of available Actions for that file (or none, depending on the file type). Here we've Ctrl-clicked on a photo; the actions do exactly what you'd expect.

2 Start a Shortcut

You can create very complex Actions in the Automator app, but Shortcuts is much friendlier. Open Shortcuts and create a new shortcut. You should see this window, with a sidebar of suggestions on the right.