How To Resize Photos With a Shortcut On Your iPhone Or iPad

Sometimes you need to shrink an image in order to upload it to a web site or send to someone. You can do this easily on a computer, but it is harder to do on an iPhone or iPad. This Shortcut will give you a way to do it by sharing the photo to create a smaller file.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create a shortcut for your iPhone or iPad that will let you resize photos.
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So this is a situation that a lot of iPhone and iPad users come across all the time. They need to upload a photo to a website but the website won't accept a full size image. The file is just too big. Now on a Mac you could just resize the photo by exporting it out of the photos app or using any number of other apps to resize it. You could do the same on your iPhone or iPad by getting another app, bringing in the photo, resizing it, and saving it out. But you could also create a shortcut to do this for you very easily. 
So let's create the shortcut by going to the Shortcut app. Then I'm going to hit the Plus button at the top to create a new shortcut. I'm going to hit the three dots button there and I can name it. So let's name this one Resize Photo. I'm going to remove Show in Widget because I don't need to see it here in the shortcuts app. But I do want it to be in the Share Sheet so that I can hit the Share button when I'm in the Photos app and Share out the image resized. Now the Types I want to change from Anything to just Images, So I'll hit Deselect All and then I'll select Images. Then I'll hit Done. So now it says Accept Images at the top.
So the first action I want to add is getting those images from the Input. So I'm going to hit the Plus button. Then I'll hit Media. So if I look in here andI can look for Get Images from Input. You can see it says Get Images from Shortcut Input. Now when I add another one and this time I'm going to Resize Image. You can see it right there. Now it's going to resize the images and I can set it to be a width, so 640 wide, by whatever the height would be to match that width. So that's pretty good. I mean you can set that to something else if you wanted. So like let's say let's set it to 600. If you really wanted to get complex with your shortcut you could prompt for a number and then you have to enter it. 
Or you can select Ask Each Time right there. Then it will prompt you to fill in the information every time you run the shortcut. It's not as pretty as using the prompt but it will work. But we're just going to stick with making it really simple for this. So I'm going to hit the Plus button again and I'm going to do Convert Image. This will allow me to save it out basically as an image type. So I don't care what I brought in. I could have been png or a tiff or something else. But I can convert it to a jpeg. I can select jpeg there and there are different options. 
Now I'm going to add one here and this is going to be under Documents. So I'm going to Exit out of Media here and then go to Documents. Then I'm going to look for Save File. So I've taken in the image, resized it, I've converted it to JPEG in case it wasn't already, and now I'm going to save it out so it's a file rather than something in the Photos app. So I don't want to fill up my Photos apps with alternate versions of the same photo. I want to save this out as a file. A file that I can attach to an email or upload to a website. So it's already set for Save the Converted Image. It's going to use the service iCloud Drive. I can go into that and use any other service I have installed. So I can use Dropbox for instance. I'm going to have Ask Where to Save checked. If I were to get rid of that it would automatically save it to a place inside of the Shortcuts folder. So that could be a quick way to do it but I like the idea of asking where to save it so I can put it where I want. That will complete the script. 
So let's hit Done at the top and now you can see Resize Photo there. Let's go a use it. So here we are in the Photos app. Let's say I want to take a photo here like this one. I want to upload it to a site but I can't upload the full resolution version. It wants a smaller version. So when I'm in here I hit the Share button and one of the things I will see appear here is this shortcut that we added. There's Resize Photo. I'll tap that and it's going to go through and do everything that we asked and then go to the end where it's going to ask us to choose where to save the file. 
So I'm going to select this folder here called Temp and save it to that. Note that if I want to rename it, see the name there at the top, it's going to use the same name. I can tap that and I can rename the file. So I could put My Photo. Done. So you can see it's going to use that name. So a bonus I get to name it what I want. I'll hit Save. So now I can go over to the Files app and look for that Temp folder in the Documents folder there. I can see there's that photo I saved. It's only a 103 KB. So much smaller than the several MB of the original photo.
So the great thing about this shortcut is it will appear anyplace where your dealing with photos. So, for instance, you can use it in the Files app itself if you have an image there saved as a file. You can Share it and then go and resize it and save out another copy. If you're using a different photos app or some different app that manages your photos for you then you can also Share it from there and you'll find the same shortcut there. So you can easily save out a resized version to upload online, send by email, or do whatever you want with it.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Resize Photos With a Shortcut On Your iPhone Or iPad”

sreenivas reddy

5 years ago

Excellent Post. Been looking for this. This will be helpful to reduce the size of the pics

Martin Kimeldorf

You save it to a temp folder...is that one you created, or is that the file folder on my iPhone? Or is that something you create inside the file folder? And if so, can you show us how to do that as well?

Gary Rosenzweig

Martin: That is a folder I created in the Files app. You can use any folder you want there or create any one you want there. Up to you.

Colleen Smitherman

How did you get the little red cursor on your iPad video? I do demos for our computer club and could sure use one!

Colleen: See https://macmost.com/how-to-use-a-mouse-with-your-ipad.html

Lorraine Tee

Thank you for posting this handy tip.
Quick question, is it possible to save the resized image on your iPhone directly and not use iCloud drive?
I am a relatively new user of the iPhone and would prefer to do this instead of uploading to the cloud.
Thanks in advance!

Lorraine: It is much easier to do it via iCloud. If you are a new user then iCloud is the way to go. Otherwise, you could transfer via AirDrop or save the image to your Photos app and sync your photos.

Comments Closed.

How To Resize Photos With a Shortcut On Your iPhone Or iPad

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Resize Photos With a Shortcut On Your iPhone Or iPad”

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