Creating QR Codes On Your Mac

Gary here with MacMost. Let's look at creating QR Codes on your Mac. 

QR Codes, of course, are those handy little square graphics with black dots. You'll see them in places like restaurants, or on signs, things like that. Usually you point your phone at them, use the camera, and it will take you to a webpage. You can actually use QR Codes for a variety of different things. The basic idea is that a QR Code will represent a string of characters but just in a way that is easy for a mobile phone's camera to be able to read and reproduce. So a simple QR Code, like this one, may simply represent the characters in a URL, like going to MacMost.com. But the great thing about QR Codes is that your camera can read them no matter how long they are. So, if a long URL going to a specific webpage inside of a directory inside of a website you don't have to rely on somebody typing all of that. They can simply point their phone at it and the phone will figure out the URL and go to the webpage in the browser. 

Most QR Codes are just this. They go to webpages. Sometimes they can be complex webpages like ones that trigger going to The App Store to show a specific app or even to some other app to go to a specific part of that app. But they are basically just URLs. The same thing as just typing in the webpage address. It is just a lot easier to go from the physical world, the online world, if you can point your camera at it instead of relying on the user to type each character. But how to create these codes? If you search online you are going to come up with tons of websites that will allow you to create QR Codes. The only problem is you probably never heard of most of these websites. You don't know what they are doing when they encode the URL. Probably most of them aren't doing anything. They are just taking these characters and making a nice looking QR Code.  But, it's possible that some of them could be redirecting through their own site, acting as a kind of URL shortener, and then they could use that to either track the visitors to your webpage or there may be a problem if that website or service disappears in the future. Your QR Code doesn't work anymore. So it's always safest to just generate your own QR Code. But how to do that since it looks like all of the QR Code generators are some site or service. Even if it's from a company you heard of, like Goggle or Adobe, you might not want to have anybody between your QR Code and your website. 

Fortunately there is a way to generate QR Codes directly on your Mac using a shortcut and you don't even have to create the shortcut. The shortcut is already there. It's already built-in.

So, in the Shortcuts App go to Gallery. These are some premade shortcuts that Apple provides. There are a lot of demos and things you can learn from. But if you search the Gallery for QR Code, you'll come up with this shortcut called Make QR Code. Click on  the Plus Button here to add it. So now you've got a copy of the shortcut. Go into All Shortcuts and you should see it there. If you take a look at it you can see exactly what it does. It's is going to prompt for the type of QR Code. As it turns out you can use QR Codes for a lot more than just opening a website. But that is the first option here. Then there are a bunch of other options and you can see exactly how it works if you're interested. If not, you don't actually even need to look at the code. You can just click the little Play button there and run this with whatever you need to use it. You can see here it prompts you for what type of QR Code to make.

So if it is just a simple Open Website you choose that and then choose the site. So I'm going to choose MacMost.com and I can choose a really long URL that goes to a specific page. Click Done and it will generate this QR Code like that. Now I can simply right click or two-finger click on a trackpad and select Copy Image. Now that I've done that say I'm working on a site I'm making or page I can just paste it in here and then resize it and work with it just like any other image. Now I've got that QR Code there. Somebody points their iPhone at it and uses the Camera App. They will go to MacMost.com. 

This is a quick and handy way to do it and it's all done on your Mac. There is no third party involved. Code is actually just your URL there. There is no middleman. It will never stop working as long as your website works that QR Code will go there as surely as somebody typing in that URL. 

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But notice you can also do a lot of other things here. So when you run it one of the things you can do is Send a Message or Send an Email. For instance, for sending an email use that and then it is going to have you select a contact. This is going to be where the email goes. So if it is going to be an email that you want coming to you, like you want a QR Code that says Email Me for More Information, then you would select your contact here. You can see I can select the email address there. You could have the subject line filled in, so do Test Subject. We can have the body of the email filled in. Of course all this can be edited before the user sends. It doesn't send it automatically. So you can have whatever you want in here and then hopefully somebody could add extra information to it, if they want, in the body. Then it generates this QR Code. So if they take their phone and point it at say a sign that you've created then you'll see the QR Code information appear here at the bottom. They click it and you can see it comes up with an email like this. Everything is filled in. It works the same for Messages.

You can also Add a Contact. So this is a great way to share, say, your business card with somebody. This is actually a way that not only you can have it on a sign but maybe even have it shown on your screen if you want. Bring up this graphic. So you choose that contact there and it creates this V Card and if somebody were to point their phone at this you can see here it comes up and it brings up all the contact information and they can now choose to create a new contact, add to existing contact, and all of that. All the information is filled in and it is easy for them to do. 

You can also Add an Event. So, to do this you would call the event something and then you can add a specific date, like that. Add an ending date, let's just leave it the same. Then this will allow them to quickly add an event to their calendar. So here we go. There's the name of the event there. Tap it and it brings up the event details and they can add to their calendar. 

You can also have it setup a wireless network. You would enter the name of your wi-fi network. Then enter in the password and then Done. It creates this QR Code and when they point their phone at it you can see it's got a little Join and that network there. This could even be a hidden network that they wouldn't normally see and you're just providing them with the name of the network and the password to get on. You could put this up on a sign in your home for a quest to use. 

So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.