Creating Photo Collages and GIFs Using Mac Shortcuts

Learn how to use the Shortcuts app to make photo collages from the Photos app or files. You can also build animated GIFs for sharing, or videos.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you some ways you can combine photos using the Shortcut App so you can share them. 
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So let's say you have a group of photos and you want to share them, maybe through an email, maybe on a social media site, but you want to combine them into a collage or some other way instead of just sending a group of photos. Of course you can create a document using something like Pages or a video using something like iMovie to create something that way. But, that takes a lot of steps. If you find yourself doing this often you may want to use a shortcut to combine the photos. 
Let's start off by creating a collage. So I'm going to create a new shortcut. I'm going to call it Photo Collage. Then first let's get the photos from the Photos App. So I'm going to search for Photos and I'm going to pick Select Photos. I can do Show More and I'll say I want to Select Multiple photos. Then what am I going to do with those. Well, I'm going to search for Combine and there is Combine Images. So it will combine the photos and I get to have it do it horizontally, vertically, or in a Grid. Let's do in a Grid and then Show More. We can set Spacing here if we like. 
Now let's go and run this and try it out. It's going to go to the Photos App right here. I'm going to go to Albums and then I'm going to go to the album I created. I'm going to select all of these, Shift click between the first and the last one to select them all. Add and you could see the results coming up right here. There you go. There's a grid, 3 x 3, and there's eight of them. Let's try it with some spacing. I'll do 20 pixels per spacing and try the same thing. Now you get a little separation between them. So photos in a grid is going to try to go with a square. So you want to keep that in mind when selecting the number of photos that you want. But you could also choose something like Horizontally or Vertically. Let's try vertically and see what we get. So now I get this neat little strip here. I can use QuickLook at this point and I can zoom in on it. I can also use the Share button here and share it in a variety of ways or Open With Preview. 
If I want to do something else with it I could, for instance, use Mail and then select Send Email. Then Combine Image To and then leave this blank. So then when i do it, it opens up a new composition window and its got that image already attached here. Make sure, of course, you set the image size so it doesn't compress it and make it too small. Now you can set this to be in the Menu Bar here and you can use it anytime you need. Another simple thing you can do is just Save it to the Clipboard. So now if I run this, when it's done I can just Paste it anywhere that I want like in an email or a message. 
Now instead of selecting Photos here I can combine and I'm going to Clear this and then Control Click on it and then say Shortcut Input. Now let's get rid of Select Photos. I want to click on Any here and clear that out. Click on it again and say I just want Images and then this will take whatever the shortcut input is and use it in the collage. So now I want to do something after this so that I can use that Copy to Clipboard or I can just do a Quick Look here to bring up the Quick Look window on its own. So now I have those images here in the Finder, not in the Photos App. I can select them all, Control click, go to Quick Actions, select photo collage and then it will create the photo collage and then show it in Quick Look like this. So now I can use the Share button here or open it in Preview and Save it.
Let's say we don't want to do a Collage. There are other things we can do as well. Let's get rid of these here and instead create an animated GIF. So what I'm going to do here is use Make GIF. I'm going to add that to the end. Take the shortcut input and Make a GIF. Show More. How many seconds per photo? Well this isn't the kind of thing where it is an animation. We kind of want it to flip through like a slide show. So we will do 1 second, Loop Forever, Auto Size or I can turn that off and I can set a width and height if I want. I'll just leave Auto Size On. Now let's go and do Quick Look afterwards so it actually outputs it somewhere. Now we can Rename this Photo GIF. Let's go and Select All of these. Control Click. Quick Actions Photo GIF and now we get this Photo GIF. It's just a little slideshow. It just flips through them all. So it is kind of a cool thing to share there to social media, for instance, instead of having a whole collection of photos. Just this GIF that's going to catch people's eye as they scroll through because it is going to keep going from photo to photo.  
In that case maybe the idea that you posted a lot of your pictures somewhere online and you include a Link to that and this little GIF here, that's going to act as the preview of that. They can click on it and then go and see all of your photos and view them individually. Of course we can use this with photos as well. I can add Select Photos here. Drag that up here. Control Click on this and say Select Magic Variable. Get the output from Select Photos. So now it is no longer going to rely on this. We can go back in here. Remove this as a Quick Action. So now it is pretty simply and we can just run it here or we can have it pinned to the Menu Bar. Let's make sure we remember to Add Select Multiple and now we can go here. Run it from there even without the Shortcut App launched and it will create that animated GIF and open it in Quick Look. So now we can click here and we can send it in an email or wherever. Or if we just want to save it directly to a file we can get rid of this. We can do Save and then Select Save File here at the end. Save the GIF. Ask where to save. Now if we launch this, like that, go in here. Select the photos. It is going to ask where to save it. We'll save it here to the Desktop. You can see it saves it right there. In Quick Look you can see it is animated. I can rename it here to Save it or just upload it to a social media site for sharing. 
Suppose you want to upload it to a site that doesn't accept GIFs but does accept videos. Like you want to upload to YouTube. Well, you could actually do that. If you search for Video there is a Make Video from GIF. So let's insert that here, right after Make a GIF from Photos.  It's going to make it from Photos and make Video from the GIF. Let's Control Click and change this so it is pulling the video there. So now when we run this we select the same photos and it will ask us where to Save. The result here is going to be a video file rather than a GIF and you can upload this as is or maybe bring it into iMovie to add some audio to it. 
So I hope this gives you some ideas on how to use Shortcuts to combine some photos for sharing. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Creating Photo Collages and GIFs Using Mac Shortcuts”

Cor van der Linden

2 years ago

Great! Ever thought of making a shortcuts course?

Joyce

I have an older Mac and I went to the Apps and couldn't find Mac Shortcuts? Is this just for newer Macs?

Gary Rosenzweig

Joyce: It is your version of macOS that matters, not the year of your Mac. You need macOS Monterey.

Cor: Yes, I even started. But the topic area is too large. I could do 100 video lessons and would still not cover a lot of what people want. Plus, it is a form of programming and you have such a wide range of levels there.

Alex Zavatone

Great tip, Gary. I've never used the shortcut app before at all. One other tip to reduce the size of image is to drag the PNG or JPG image into the free ImageOptim app. That makes individual images smaller. Used with this combine tip, that's a really nice technique.
Cheers, my friend.

Comments Closed.

Creating Photo Collages and GIFs Using Mac Shortcuts

Comments: 5 Responses to “Creating Photo Collages and GIFs Using Mac Shortcuts”

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