9 Tips For Sharing Links And Images

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for sending web links. 

So sending links to somebody else, whether it's through an email or a text message, is pretty simple. But there are better ways to do things sometimes. 

For instance, let's take this big retail website and if I were to want to send this product to somebody else I may copy the link here and then go to Mail, and Paste it in. But look how big this URL is. It's huge. Now it will work but why does it need to be so big. Well, it doesn't. All that's needed is the beginning part of the URL. Actually only up to about here. If you use this online retailer a lot you get to know this. The rest of the stuff, this is all like tracking stuff. You don't want to include that because, well, it's unwieldy but also there's really no advantage for you or the other person. 

So, back here you can go to the URL and you can try to guess what is needed. Here, after the product's ID, I don't think anything else is needed so I can put my pointer there and grab and drag down to signify that I want to select everything to the right. Then press delete. Now here's the important part. You can test it by pressing Return. It's only going to use what's here. Or, if you want, you can do Command A, Command C and then open a new tab, paste in just that section, and press Return. If it works, if it takes you to the right place you can go and just paste in that part of the URL instead of the rest. 

A lot of times there is a ton of junk parameters at the end of URLs and it is really handy to try to take them off the end, test them before you send them, and send the shortest link possible. 

Another thing people often do in wanting to copy a link is that they will select the text on the page, like this. Use Command C to copy. Then go and paste it in, like that. But you can see if this is a text only email you don't get the link at all. If your message is Rich Text and you paste in you do get the text and it works as a link. You can see it right there that it is a link. But you also get the style and color and everything like that. To paste a link cleanly don't select and copy the text. But instead Control Click, Right Click, or two-finger click on your trackpad and bring up the Context Menu. Then look for Copy, Link. That will ignore the text there and all of the styling. Then you can paste and it will paste the actual link instead of any of that other stuff. 

Likewise, if you do a search and you see the page you want in the search results, if you copy the link there, I'm going to use the Context Menu and Copy Link. Then notice if I paste that link in I don't get a clean URL. The actual URL is hidden in there. You can see it starting right here. What you're getting is all of the tracking stuff from the search engine.

Now there are many different ways to work around that. But the cleanest way that is going to work anywhere is simply go to the page first so you get the actual real URL there. Copy that and paste that into your message. 

Now sometimes you want to send a  link but not just to the page, but a specific section in the page. Maybe even specific text. So, for instance, if you wanted to specifically point out to somebody this text here you could select it. Just highlight it just like you would text in a word processor. Then Control Click, Right Click, or two-finger click on the text and look for Copy Link With Highlight. When you do that and then you paste that in you get a special URL. You'll see it starts off just like the regular URL to the page but it includes some other stuff here. Now this isn't tracking or anything like that. This is specifically saying for this link take the person who clicks it right to that part of the page. But more than that it will highlight that text for them. 

So for instance, if that person were to click on the link and go to that page, and notice how it popped that text out right away and it remains highlighted. So you can point out exact text to somebody on a webpage. It doesn't have to be setup by the webpage creator in advance. You do it when you select the text and use that special Copy Link With Highlight function. 

The great thing is they don't have to have Safari or even be on a Mac for this to work. It will work on the iPhone and the iPad and in most browsers even on Windows. 

Now this next one is a big one and one a lot of people ignore or get frustrated by. Say you copy a URL like this. For this example let's go ahead and use Messages, but the same thing may happen in Mail. Paste in the link and instead of getting just a plain text link you get a little preview. A preview of the page taken from an image on that page. You get the title. You get the website there. This is what the person gets on the other end. But, if you don't want to clutter their messages up with this image here, you just want to send them a plain link, you could always Control Click, Right Click, or two-finger click on the image there and use Convert To Text Link. Then it changes to a regular text link like that. In fact if you're sick of doing that in Mail, there's actually a Setting for it, in Mail, Settings, under Composing, you've got Add Link Previews right there. You can switch that off to stop it from doing it. 

Now another thing you may want to do, especially if the URL is really long, is you may want to shorten it. So you could certainly use any URL shortener you want. It's really handy for sending a URL in Messages or in an email. ISGD is a decent email shortener, and you can paste in your long URL there. Shorten it and you'll get this shorter link here. If it is an extremely long URL that you want to send this could be really handy. 

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Now remember just because you can see a webpage doesn't mean somebody else can. You may be logged into a site that they can't see unless they log in as well. For instance this commonly happens with things like Instagram and Facebook. So here I am looking at an instagram photo and I may find, oh I can easily copy a link directly to this. But, here's the thing. If you send it to somebody else they may not be able to see it. You can test this by using a private web browsing window. So go to File, New Private Window like this. This acts like it is not you. You're not logged into anything. So if you paste in the URL that you copied and go to it this is what they will see. They may see this signup log in thing here and maybe they can see the video or image. Maybe they can't. So when in doubt try creating a New Private Window to test the link before sending it to somebody. 

The same goes for any kind of private account kind of thing. For instance you may want to test out a link to a photo in a photo gallery that you uploaded to make sure that somebody who's not logged into that service, doesn't have an ID there or just isn't you, can actually see the same thing that you're seeing before you send them that link. 

Now when you want to send a link to something like YouTube Video, you may be tempted to actually just grab the link here at the top and send it. But that is basically just asking that person to watch that entire video to see what it is you're talking about. If there is something specific in the video that you want them to see remember to include the time for them to go to. So, for instance, in this video you may say, oh start watching at 3 minutes and 8 seconds in. Or in YouTube you can simply go to Share and you can check the Start At checkbox there. Then when you copy this URL it will include a link directly to that time. So you can paste in and they will go to the video and right to that time. You can actually see it here. When I paste in the T equals and 188 seconds. In other words 3 minutes and 8 seconds in. That's where the video will start playing for them. 

Now sometimes we're not sharing links in Mail or Messages or anything online. But we're sharing them in real life. When you do that if it's a long URL you're asking somebody to read and then type into their phone or other device that whole URL. This is why we have QR codes. QR codes make it easy to scan a URL using your phone's camera and it works across different devices. It's easy to create a QR code to printout and put somewhere. All you need is first the URL. I'll copy this one here. Then you need a service that will create a QR code for you. But you don't have to use somebody else's service. A lot of times that is going to inject trackers or it is going to put a Logo on the printout. What you want to do is use Apple's own solution that's already on your Mac. Go into the Shortcuts App and then go to Gallery. Then search specifically for QR space Code. You should see Make QR Code here. You can add this shortcut. Now you've got that and you can use that shortcut to generate nice, clean QR codes. I've got a whole video on that you can check out if you want to know more. 

So those are some handy tips for the next time you need to send a weblink to somebody else. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.