How To Create QR Codes On Your Mac or iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create QR Codes on your Mac. 

Now since I last talked about QR codes on your Mac Apple has actually updated the shortcut action that does this to give you more options. So let's take a look. 

So you can create QR codes on your Mac using Shortcut App. I'm going to create a new shortcut here by clicking the Plus button and I'm going to give it a title. Now creating QR codes in Shortcut means that you can do it completely on your Mac. You're not using any website service and you're getting a QR code that goes directly to the URL, not going through some other site. So it is a good way to do it and it's really easy to do it once you have it setup. 

The first thing we're going to do here is we're going to get the location of the current webpage of Safari. So whatever Safari is showing right now. So I'm going to look for Current URL and there's Get Current Webpage from Safari. I'll just double click on that to add it. Really the only other step that is needed is the Create QR Code Action. I'm going to double click on that and add it here and it is going to create a QR code for this webpage. Now to make sure there is no confusion instead of just leaving this as a webpage I'm just going to click on it once. Just a single click not Control Click or Right Click or anything like that. I can take a property of the webpage, in this case the page URL. So now it is clear what it is making a QR code from. Now this will work just as it is. If I look at Safari here I'm at the MacMost homepage. So now if I were  run the Shortcut it creates the QR code that would take people to MacMost.com.

But, what's new here are a lot of really cool options. So the first two are the Colors. So you get the foreground color, in this case the parts you see here that are black, and the background color, in this case the parts you see here that are white. So if I wanted to make this a little bit more colorful maybe make it a kind of dark red that MacMost uses, I can choose that as the background color there and when I run this you can see I get that. I can choose the same as a foreground color. Maybe I can make the foreground color white, like that. So you can play around with those colors. 

You can also choose the rounded look. Notice these are all squares. But if I choose rounded and then run it, then I get these dots and little rounded squares in the corners. But also you can choose Error Correction. Now you may think this is just to make more robust QR codes. That's what it is. The difference between Low and Medium is that Low Error Correction means  that the piece of paper that it is printed on is partially ripped or it's wrinkled or maybe poor lighting condition that is less likely to be able to get URL whereas the medium is a little bit better. You also have these other options. Quartile and High. So with quartile we get a QR code that looks like that. If we do high we get a QR code that looks like that that has this square in the middle of it. The thing with the square in the middle of it is that people like to put images in there like logos, or some text, or whatever. So you can take this graphic here and you can Control Click on it and Quick Look it and from here you can open in Preview or you can Share with someone else. Or you can simply put a Copy to the Clipboard action here at the end and now when this runs it still runs and gives you the output here in Shortcuts but this also a copy to the Clipboard. So like now in Pages if I'm just making a sign I can just Command V and paste and it pastes it in and I can resize it like I want. 

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Then here in Pages I can maybe put an image here over the center part. Or if I'm bringing it to a graphics app like Pixelmator Pro or PhotoShop I can work on whatever I want in the middle. But it is actually not very hard to do that in Shortcuts as well. You can just have Shortcuts add the graphic. It is actually fairly simple because there is an Action for that. So, look for Overlay. You've got Overlay Image. Just add this, actually I'm going to add it before it copies to the Clipboard and now it is going to take an image. So what I want to do is I want to get a file, I'll use the File Action here, and I'll just add a file. I actually put a simple small square graphic with a logo here as a file. So now I can actually put here and go to the Desktop and select that. Now it gets that. Now it is going to Overlay the file on, then I'll Control Click, right click, or two finger click on this and changes to QR code. So to make sure you have these right, it's going to take the file from here and overlay that on top of the Qr code from here. 

Now there are some options for Overlay right here. It's Show Image Editor which will allow you to actually adjust the image. So I'll run this and you can see I've got one overlaying the other. I can grab it, drag it around, and position where I want. I can set the opacity. But none of that is really going to get me what I want. So instead I'm going to turn off Show Image Editor and I'm going to set everything manually. I'm going to do Center first. When I do that the output is going to center it and it is going to work fine except it is going to take up too much space. So I'm going to give it a width and height. You just have to use trial and error with this. You only need to give it a width because the height will be calculated. It turns out after working with it for a bit 320 works pretty well. If it didn't I'd just adjust the number up or down until I got something I liked. So now it makes the QR code and it puts this file overlayed on top of it and copies out to the Clipboard. So if I were to want to paste it in now you can see I get that image. So now, for instance, I can use this to as a way to create QR codes to link different webpages at MacMost and it would always have the MacMost logo in there. 

Now you can do other things with QR codes besides just a URL to a website. If you go to the Gallery for Shortcuts and you search for QR Code. For some reason this doesn't come up if you search for QR or make QR, but QR Code seems to bring up this shortcut here. You can click on that and then you can click here to actually preview it before you add it. In here its got the code for making other types of QR codes like ones with phone numbers or email addresses, contacts, events, all sorts of things. So you can kind of raid this shortcut for code that will make other kinds of QR codes. Or you can just add the shortcut. But this shortcut here doesn't actually have any of those new features in the part where it creates a QR code. So you can go in here and customize it for something you like and even add that part where it adds your logo in the middle. 

Now if you're trying to use this on an iPhone you're going to run into trouble. Notice that the very first action, get current webpage from Safari, only works on Mac. But you're just using that to get the URL. So you can get rid of this pretty easily and then you can simply add an input here. I'm going to ask for Input and then ask for Text and then put the prompt there like paste the URL here, and then tap where it says webpage here and just have the results of Ask For Input into that. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it would be to go to the details for Shortcut here and say you want it shown in the Share Sheet, like that. This can will then take input from the Share Sheet and it can receive just simply URL's, like that. Then this can change to be the Shortcut Input. So now the idea is you can be in Safari here, have the three dots and then Share and then pick from the list of available shortcuts to create QR code from current smart page. You give it permission the first time. Then it will copy that to the Clipboard and then you can paste it into whatever you want. I'm just going to paste it into Notes so you can see it.  

So the Shortcut is going to look a little bit different here if you want it to work on the iPhone or iPad but you could then use this same shortcut on the Mac. You just have to use it by sharing out the URL and triggering the shortcut instead of the much easier just running it anyway you like on your Mac. 

This makes it super easy to make good looking QR codes without having to rely on some site or service. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.