Master Quick Actions

Make your Mac life even easier with the power of Actions

- Carrie Marshall

IT WILL TAKE 
15 minutes

YOU WILL LEARN 
How to add useful 
Actions to Finder

YOU’LL NEED 
macOS 12 or later

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