First Shortcut

Learn to create your very first shortcut.

Download Links:

First Shortcut Link


Transcript:

Okay, enough talking about shortcuts, let's make one.

I'm in the shortcuts app, and you can see the plus button in the upper right corner that allows you to create a new shortcut. I'm going to go ahead and tap it now. And now we've created a new shortcut.

First thing I'm gonna do is tap the ellipses button next to the name, and give it an icon and this one is going to involve photos. So I'm going to use the-- the photo, the camera. And these are always easy to see, except when you're doing them while recording a video and everybody's watching. There it is. And we're gonna call this, First Shortcut and tap Done. We've given it a name. If we exit out tapping the Done button, you see there it is at the bottom, and it's got the little camera icon. Now if I tap the ellipses button inside the icon, it brings me back to this edit view. And this is gonna be a simple shortcut.

Have you ever gone somewhere with family and you kept taking a bunch of pictures that you just wanted to text message to a few people. That's a pain in the neck. You can make that easier with a shortcut.

So what we're gonna do is first we're going to get the last photo. And if I just type last photo up in the search bar, you can see there is a command or a shortcut step called Get Latest Photos, you can change that to as many as you want, I'm just gonna make it the last one photo.

If I tap on the Show More button, I can say include screenshots or do not, I do not want to include screenshots, this is just for photos. So there we go and I'll hide that. And then the next thing we do is send that off as a message. So I'm gonna just type message, you can see Send Message is another command, I can drag it in there. And it's drew a line between the first step and the second step. So one of the nice things is shortcuts tries to figure out what you're doing. And since it knows that I picked one photo in the first step, and I have a Send Message in the second step, it's automatically going to attach that. Now if that wasn't there, if I delete that you see the line between them disappeared. I can put the photo back in though, all I have to do is tap on that message and you can see at the bottom of the screen where it says Variables, there's either the magic variable, which I'll talk about later or there is just a button for the latest photos. So it's looking at that step, it's in the essence, added a variable. I'll tap it, and then I might put it back in. And then you can put recipients in there. So I went ahead and added my wife and kids as recipients. So when I run this script, every time it's gonna send the pictures to just those three people. This is the joy of automation. You don't have to do that manually every time you want to run this, so I’ll tap Done.

So then to run it, all I have to do is press the play button in the lower right corner to kick it off or I could exit the script and just tap on for shortcut, I'll do that. It's going, it's getting the most recent picture I took. And it set it up as a text message. Now all I have to do is press the Send button and send a random picture to my wife and kids and make them wonder what I'm doing again. I'm gonna tap the ellipses again to go back in, I'm gonna tap the Show More button now.

So when I uncheck the Show When Run box, it will just send the photo with a message without me even seeing the draft. That makes the automation even faster and easier. I use a script very much like this when we have family events and I want to share photos with just a very select few people, and not necessarily put them on the internet. But let's have a little bit more fun with this.

Now as we go through the course, you're gonna see so many different steps you can do with shortcuts with all these different apps and options we've got and there's a screencast on all of the stuff, so don't let it overwhelm you. But the way I usually find these steps, once I know what there as, I just search for them. So I'm gonna search for Markup.

There it is, this is a cool step they added I believe last year shortcuts. And I'm just gonna stick that in between the photo and the message. And what this allows me to do is draw on the picture before I send it So I've got it picking one photo, then allowing me to mark it up, then I need to send it. Now the problem is it shows the latest photos here is the variable that is picking which is this first box.

So I'm gonna go ahead and delete that now. And instead, I'll tap on it again. And we want to get this markup result down here on the variable list.

So rather than grabbing the photo from the first block, we're gonna grab the photo from the second block after we've marked it up.

So let's run that now. Tap Done, tap on the shortcut. Okay, it's grabbed the image of me, and then I can have fun with it for long.

There we go, keep myself a mustache. And when I'm done, I just have Done in the upper left corner and then it opens up the message and I'm ready to send it with my markup.

So there's a [simple] for a shortcut, it's really only two steps. But when we add the additional markup that adds a third step to it. And it gives you an idea of the power of automation with Shortcuts.

So as you work through this course, you're gonna put together this library of knowledge with all the triggers and actions that shortcuts can do and then you're gonna be able to build your very own shortcuts to take what's tedious and make it automatic.

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