Full transcript of “10 iPhone Shortcuts You NEED - Shazam to Playlist, Photos to PDF, Hold That Thought”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Here are 10 useful new shortcuts that you requested. Automatically add Shazam songs to a playlist. Can't tap that URL in an Instagram caption? This shortcut can fix that. Automatically create a new reminders list every day for your tasks. Save shopping items to a bare note. And I recently figured out you can do a mass mail merge, all with shortcuts. First up, how can we automatically add Shazam songs to an Apple Music playlist? Well, if you use the Shazam action, you can add to library, but that doesn't add it to a specific playlist. Instead, use two more actions. One is a Find Product on the iTunes Store, and when you add that action, make sure to choose Apple Music ID. By default, it chooses Shazam Media, and that's not gonna work adding it to a playlist. But once you add Find That in the iTunes Store, then you can add that iTunes product
0:46 to whatever Apple Music playlist you'd like. Remember to tap here and choose your playlist of choice before you run the shortcut. Now when you run the shortcut, it will automatically recognize the song and then add it to that playlist. And if I go to my Shazam song playlist. you'll see it added it automatically. Number two, if you're ever browsing Instagram and you see a post like this and they put a URL there, you know Instagram doesn't let you tap it. And trying to copy and paste that, they don't make it easy either. So I created a shortcut to fix that. I call it my open Instagram URL shortcut. And all it does is take a screenshot. It extracts text from that screenshot, gets URLs and then opens them. And this doesn't save the screenshot to your photo library. So it's not going to clutter up your photos. Now, I would program this to either a back tap or the action button. Let's program it to the action button real quick. You can also put the shortcut in a menu and choose from multiple action button shortcuts.
1:35 We'll choose our open Instagram URL. And now our action button is going to work. Now, when I'm looking at that post, I see a URL in the caption. I can hold the action button. It's going to run that shortcut. And in just a few seconds, it's opening the link that was in the caption and I'm ready to go. Number three, Kelly A from my shortcuts community wanted to be able to create a new reminders list every day with new tasks. But this way it's dated and she can look back at all the days So what this does is create a new reminders list with today's date in the name. In this text block, add whatever reminders you would like to have. So these will be created as individual tasks every day. There's no alert, but you can customize that. So every reminder could have an alert or priority. And then you can set this up as an automation to run every morning. And this reminders list will just be waiting for you.
2:22 If I run it right now, that quickly it created the list. And there you see the daily list with today's date and all the tasks I had I had listed in that text block individual. By the way, Kelly left that request in my shortcuts community, which you can join at create.beard.fm. There's almost 1500 people as a part of the community, and if you want priority shortcuts requests, access to my shortcut of the week where I share a weekly shortcut never seen in my videos, and access my shortcuts GPT which can help you build your own, especially with APIs like from the weather service and movie database, and of course priority shortcuts requests, and I reply to every one. Over 130 people have become a paying member for $5 a month and get access to all those additional features. And if you choose to become a member, I truly appreciate the support. So you can do that at create.beard.fm. Alright, shortcut number four, you can actually do a full mail merge,
3:09 meaning sending a mass email to multiple contacts right here in shortcuts. Now I have this set up to use a .csv file. So if you have a spreadsheet of names and emails, like here I have first name and then the email, you'll need to have it in this exact format. One column for name, one column for email. And I'm just using first names. And then save that as a CSV file, or just save it somewhere where your iPhone files app can access. I'm gonna save it on my desktop because that's pretty easy to find. And now I have my CSV ready. Now this shortcut is going to ask for a subject line. And then in that second action, be sure to choose that .csv file that you saved. Here it is on my desktop, I'll tap open. And that's just using the regular files app. So it's going to pull that file, get text from that file, and then split it by those comma separated
3:55 values. Then it's going to compose an email for every person that was in that list. Now in this mail action down here, if you want this to send without any action on your part, toggle off that Show Compose Sheet, and then it will just send automatically. But if you want to preview it before each message goes out, toggle that on. Now when I run this shortcut, it's going to ask for that subject line. Let's just call it New Project. I'll tap Done. Always Allow. And now you see the email pops up with the person in the To field, and the email was actually customized with the first name that was in that CSV file. I can tap send and I'm ready to go. Again, you can... turn off that show compose sheet and then it won't show this pop-up for every contact. And then the contents of the email is actually in this text block. Again, it pulls in the first name from that spreadsheet and then you can write your email here and you have a mass email merge right here in
4:44 shortcuts. Number five, I periodically get this request on how to set up a vacation autoresponder via text to people not in your contacts. So you can download this shortcut. Again, links to this and all the ones that I've shown are in the description below. And what this does is when and I'll show you how to set up this automation in a second, then it's going to find whatever contact you might have matched to that phone number. Then it's gonna get a current focus. So if you only wanna do this when you're in weekend or vacation focus mode, that's what it's set up for. And this if statement is if all are true. So if the focus mode is personal, remember change this to whatever focus mode you might be using like vacation, and that contact is not in a contact group that you set, I have it here in a contact group called weekend, then it's going to automatically reply. So again, if you're on.
5:30 If you're on vacation and you have a focus mode enabled, someone sends you a text. If that contact is not in a specific group, like friends and family, then it's going to send them this auto-reply text message. Then to automate it, you'll go to the automation tab down here, tap the plus icon. For message, we're going to leave sender blank. And for message contains, you have to put something. We're just going to put a single space. This way it replies to any text message that has a space. We're going to run it immediately. Tap next. Now, you typically can search for... a shortcut and just choose it here, but I'm going to do New Blank Automation because we have to make sure the shortcut input is right. Now, I'm going to use the Run Shortcut Action here. Tap here and choose my AutoText if not in group. And then, when I expand the Run Shortcut Action for the input, I'm going to tap Choose Variable. We're going to do Shortcut
6:18 Input. Tap it again, and now we choose Phone Number here. This way it passes the phone number into the shortcut that we already built. Once we have that set up, this will now auto text people not in a contact group that you select when you have that Focus Mode enabled. Next, Paul on a YouTube comment wanted to be able to enable Low Power Mode every time cellular data is enabled. Now, cellular data on and off is not an automation that we can program, but we can make a shortcut with the menu. So, what I have here is a simple menu option. It asks Turn On Cellular or Turn Off Cellular, and if you choose On, it will enable the cellular data on your phone and also enable Low Power Mode. run it again, and it's going to turn off cellular and turn... off low power mode. So if I run this shortcut, let's say I want to turn on cellular, you'll see
7:05 low power mode was enabled, the battery turned yellow, and I have my cell coverage. Then if I want to turn off cellular, I can do that. Low power mode is disabled, and if I go to my connections, we'll see that cellular is off. Another Priority Shortcuts request from my community was from Anderson C, and they wanted to be able to save items they might be looking at in Safari to a bare note. So what this does is, when you're in Safari looking at an item, it's actually going to make a PDF of that page, get the name of that item and the URL, and then add it to a bare note. Now down here make sure to add text to and then choose a note. I'll create a note here called shopping list. Let's make sure that note actually exists. Let's say I'm here in Safari looking at an item. I'll tap the share button. Let's go down to save shopping item here, and now it's
7:52 going to make it into a PDF, get the link, the name of the item, and then add it to that bare note. So it ran. Let's go over to the shopping list. And there you have it. I actually have a PDF of the item if I wanted to read that, remember what it looked like. And I have the item name and URL. Next, Jamie in a YouTube comment wanted to know how to get multiple photos into a single PDF. So let's create a new shortcut from scratch to do this. Let's start with our Select Photos action, and we want to be able to select Multiple. So I'll toggle that on. You can also go to the Include section, and maybe you don't want to include videos or live photos. You can adjust that here. Then what we'll need to do is make a grid. And so I'm going to search for the... Then the next action we're going to want to look for is combine images. When I tap that action, now it's going to take the photos we had selected and then it's
8:39 going to ask how you want to combine them, either horizontally or vertically, or in a grid. Let's choose "In a grid" and for spacing let's put about 10 pixels in between each. Now let's add the "Make PDF" action. We can choose whether we want to include margin. I like doing that usually. And we're gonna make that PDF from the selected photos. Now when we run this, I can select multiple photos, like I have here, tap add, it's gonna make them into a grid, and then make a PDF. And that quickly, here's my PDF with multiple images, and if I wanted to I can add like a save file action or a share sheet, but I have that PDF document that I can do whatever I want with. This next shortcut was a request from the community and this was like a daily brain dump shortcut, one where you might have tasks or just things you want to brain dump. So this will check if a note is already created
9:25 for today. It'll be called today's tasks with the current date. If a note already exists, it's going to create it. That happens in the background, and then it's going to show you this menu option where you can either add tasks or read the tasks back to you, or add that brain dump or read the brain dump back to you. Then there's a bunch of actions to help format that. So if I run this, that note wasn't already created, so it just created it in the background. Let's add a brain dump, and then it's just gonna start listening and you can record whatever you'd like, maybe have some ideas, some tasks for the day, just things you need to do. When you're done dictating... and now it's going to add that to the note under the brain dump section. Now if I go over to Apple Notes, there's a task I created with today's date. The task block is still empty because I haven't added any, but my brain dump is there
10:12 already dictated. Then you can run this later in the day and it can read the brain dump or read your tasks back to you when you select those menus, and you can also add or read the tasks. And finally, number 10, someone was asking if they can change the phone line they use because they have multiple SIM cards right before they call a contact. Well this two action shortcut can do that. This is going to set the default voice line, or what you use to make a call, to whichever cellular plan you want. Now if you tap and hold on this cellular plan part of the action, you're going to see a menu pop up with all your phone lines. So if you want this shortcut to always use your secondary or your primary phone line, select that one. Or you can also have it ask you each time. Then it's going to call a contact, and here you can have it ask for a contact, or you can hard code a single contact with
11:00 your phone line. So when you run the shortcut, you'll be able to choose which cellular plan, or again you can hard code that. Then once you select the phone line, you can choose what contact you want to call. And then if there's a few contacts that you do this with regularly, I would just create a menu. So search for menu, do choose from menu, add the contact names here, and then under each menu item, put that call action, and instead of having it ask each time, just tap in and select the contact you want to call. Alright and a little bonus shortcut number 11, shortcut recently in an Apple newsroom article talking about accessibility features. This is a hold that thought shortcut. So if you're in the middle of doing something and you get interrupted, this can help you keep track of that. So I haven't changed this at all. Let's just run it, and I'll put a link to this down in the video description as well. Let's say I want to
11:46 capture. So if I tap okay, you see it's waiting five seconds, and what it does is takes a screenshot. So whatever you were doing on your phone, then you tell it what were you doing. I'm going to tell it I was making a shortcut video, and then it asks what were you about to do. Well, Well, I was about to edit it. Allow to save things to a clipboard, I'll tap Always Allow. It's going to append a note, I'll tap Always Allow. And now if I go over to my notes, you'll see it created a Hold That Thought note with the date and the time. What was I doing? I had it listed there. And what I was about to do, it actually saved my clipboard contents and then saved that screenshot it took with what I was just doing. Honestly, pretty cool shortcut. This also works on the Mac, and there's a bunch of actions customized for that. So kudos to Apple for making us work. That's pretty cool.
12:31 Links to all those shortcuts are down below. And if you want to join my shortcuts community again, that's at create.beard.fm support with five dollars a month. I would appreciate that. Plus, you get access to my shortcuts of the week, not seen in any videos. My priority shortcuts request and shortcuts GPT. I'll put my last shortcuts video right up here. And if you have any shortcuts requests, you can still leave them in the comments below. I did several shortcuts today from your comments. And if you missed my recent video on some great free iPhone apps that do offer pro plans, but have great features just on the free tier, check out this video right up here. Thanks for watching. I'll catch you next time.
