Your iPhone is extra highly effective than you suppose. Buried in iOS is an app referred to as Shortcuts that most individuals ignore totally, and people who do open it usually shut it instantly, overwhelmed by the programming-like interface. That’s a mistake. Shortcuts can rework tedious, repetitive images duties into single-tap operations, and when you perceive the fundamentals, you may surprise the way you ever managed with out them. I’ve made 5 helpful Shortcuts completely for Fstoppers readers.
To illustrate simply how deep this rabbit gap goes, let me describe two shortcuts I constructed for my very own each day use that don’t have anything to do with images. The first is named “Morning,” which runs after I get up. It checks my calendar for the day. It pulls my present location and checks for any energetic climate alerts in my space. It queries a sports activities API to see if my favourite baseball workforce performs at the moment. It fetches forecast discussions from meteorological sources and generates academic content material utilizing AI, together with a science time period of the day and a historic climate reality. It compiles information headlines, each nationwide and native. Then it takes each single piece of knowledge it collected and feeds it to ChatGPT with directions to assemble a pure, conversational script. Finally, my cellphone speaks your complete briefing aloud. I get up to a customized morning present masking all the things I care about, all with out touching a single app. The particular content material is totally customizable: you can swap baseball for soccer scores, exchange climate info with images suggestions, or add inventory costs and take away information totally. The structure helps no matter mixture of data issues to you.
The second shortcut, “Bedtime Charging,” triggers routinely at any time when I plug my cellphone into its charger throughout night hours. It permits Do Not Disturb, adjusts the quantity, queries my calendar for tomorrow’s occasions and jogs my memory to set an alarm, makes use of AI to generate a spoken abstract of my schedule, performs that audio aloud, after which turns off my home lights through HomeKit. One bodily motion I used to be already doing each night time now cascades into a whole bedtime routine.
Before we dive in, a number of sensible notes. You can add any shortcut to your property display screen as a widget or app icon, providing you with one-tap entry with out even opening the Shortcuts app. Some shortcuts could be triggered by automations, that means they run routinely when sure circumstances are met, similar to a time of day, arrival at a location, or connecting to a selected Bluetooth gadget. And for shortcuts that use ChatGPT integration, you may want an iPhone 15 Pro or later, or any cellphone within the iPhone 16 lineup on, as these options require Apple Intelligence and the neural processing energy of newer chips.
Shortcut #1: Watermarks
Whether you agree philosophically with watermarking or not, there is not any denying it serves a sensible goal for a lot of photographers. The downside is that watermarking is tedious. Opening every picture in an editor, positioning your watermark, exporting, and repeating the method dozens of instances turns a easy safety measure right into a time sink that daunts constant use.
To customise this shortcut, open it in edit mode and take a look at the very first motion on the high, a Text block that accommodates the watermark textual content. Simply exchange that textual content with your personal identify, model, or web site. That’s the one change required to make the shortcut yours. You may also regulate how far the watermark sits from the picture edges for those who choose it nearer to or farther from the borders. The place menu could be simplified for those who at all times use the identical nook, or expanded with further choices in order for you extra granular management.
Shortcut #2: Daily Wallpaper
This is the best shortcut within the assortment, requiring solely three actions, however its affect on each day life is surprisingly significant. We all have 1000’s of photographs sitting in our photograph libraries that we by no means take a look at after the preliminary edit and export. This shortcut modifications that by routinely rotating your gadget wallpaper by means of a curated choice of your personal work.
Before utilizing this shortcut, you may must create an album in your Photos app referred to as “Wallpapers” (spelled precisely that manner) and populate it along with your favourite photographs. The shortcut will not work with out this album in place. Vertical orientations work finest for cellphone wallpapers. If you need to use a unique album identify (for instance, one you have already got stuffed with photographs), you’ll be able to open the shortcut in edit mode and alter the album reference within the Find Photos motion.
Shortcut #3: Photo Times
Golden hour, blue hour, civil twilight, nautical twilight, astronomical twilight: photographers throw these phrases round consistently, however really figuring out when these home windows happen at your particular location usually requires opening a devoted app or web site. This shortcut delivers all of that info immediately, processed and formatted by AI right into a clear, readable abstract.
When you run the shortcut, it grabs your present GPS coordinates and queries sunrise-sunset APIs for complete astronomical knowledge. Your timezone is captured routinely for correct native time conversion. All of this uncooked knowledge feeds into ChatGPT with exact directions to return a formatted record of instances masking dawn, sundown, golden hour, morning and night blue hour, and all of the twilight phases that matter for several types of images.
One observe: whereas the information comes from dependable astronomical APIs, it is at all times value double-checking instances for important shoots. Weather circumstances, approximation formulation, AI processing, your actual place relative to the horizon, and native topography can all have an effect on when usable mild really begins or ends. Treat the output as a superb place to begin relatively than absolute gospel.
Shortcut #4: Caption This Photo!
Writing Instagram captions is a friction level that stops many photographers from posting constantly. You have an awesome picture able to share, however you then’re gazing a clean caption subject attempting to compose one thing participating whereas concurrently remembering which hashtags are at the moment performing properly in your area of interest. This shortcut collapses that complete course of right into a single faucet.
Because ChatGPT is analyzing the precise visible content material of your picture, the captions and hashtags it generates are contextually related. It will acknowledge the distinction between a panorama, a portrait, and a road {photograph}, adjusting its output accordingly. This shortcut requires an AI-capable iPhone for the imaginative and prescient options, and you may customise the immediate to raised match your private voice or model if the default output feels too generic. Photographers who publish to a number of platforms would possibly create variants with totally different immediate directions optimized for Twitter’s brevity versus Instagram’s longer-form captions.
Shortcut #5: Daily Photo Clean
Photo library upkeep is a kind of duties that everybody is aware of they need to do however no one really does. The prospect of scrolling by means of 1000’s of photographs to delete redundant pictures and failed experiments is just too overwhelming to start out. This shortcut reframes the issue totally, turning library cleanup right into a each day micro-habit constructed round an “On This Day” idea.
When you run the shortcut, it searches for pictures taken on at the moment’s calendar date throughout your complete photograph historical past. Running it on December twenty seventh, for instance, finds pictures taken on December twenty seventh of yearly you have had your cellphone. All matches get collected right into a single view. If no pictures exist for at the moment’s date, you get a notification saying so. If pictures are discovered, you are offered with a variety interface exhibiting photographs from this date throughout a number of years. Choose the pictures you need to delete, they usually’re eliminated out of your library.
The thought of this strategy is that it makes cleanup manageable whereas additionally being barely nostalgic. You’re reviewing a manageable cross-section of your archive, pictures from this actual date throughout your complete historical past with the gadget. It’s a extra participating technique to prune your assortment than dealing with the monolithic job of sorting by means of all the things directly. The shortcut could be automated to run each morning for those who select, prompting you to delete one or two photographs as a part of your each day routine. Over the course of a 12 months, these small each day deletions add as much as vital library upkeep with out ever feeling burdensome.
Several of those shortcuts turn into considerably extra highly effective when mixed with iOS automations. The Daily Wallpaper shortcut is an apparent candidate: set it to run routinely at 6 AM, and your cellphone refreshes its background each morning with none guide intervention. The Daily Photo Clean shortcut pairs properly with a morning automation, maybe operating proper after you dismiss your first alarm, turning library upkeep right into a behavior that requires no aware determination to provoke.
The Photo Times shortcut might be automated to run while you arrive at a regularly visited taking pictures location, providing you with an instantaneous readout of the day’s mild home windows with out having to recollect to verify. The Watermarks shortcut works properly as a house display screen widget since you may usually run it manually after a deliberate culling and choice course of.
To create an automation, open the Shortcuts app, faucet the Automation tab on the backside, and faucet the plus button. You’ll see an inventory of triggers together with Time of Day, Arrival at Location, When Connecting to CarPlay, and lots of others. Select your set off, select which shortcut to run, and resolve whether or not you need the automation to run routinely or require affirmation. Automations that run with out affirmation are notably highly effective as a result of they take away all friction from the method.
Getting Started
All 5 shortcuts can be found for obtain completely by means of the hyperlinks on this article. For shortcuts requiring AI capabilities, you may want an iPhone 15 Pro or later operating iOS 18.1 or newer with Apple Intelligence enabled. The easier shortcuts like Watermarks and Daily Wallpaper will work on any iPhone operating a latest model of iOS.
The Shortcuts app has a studying curve, however these downloads provide you with working examples to look at and modify. Open any shortcut in edit mode to see precisely the way it’s constructed, and do not be afraid to experiment with customizations. The worst factor that occurs is you delete the shortcut and are available again to this text to re-download a recent copy. Once you internalize the logic of how actions join to at least one one other, you may begin seeing automation alternatives in all places in your images workflow. That export course of you repeat identically each time? Automate it. That particular set of albums you add selects to after each shoot? Automate it. That climate verify you do earlier than heading out for golden hour? Automate it.
Your cellphone is extra succesful than you are letting it’s. These 5 shortcuts are just the start.